Russian authorities have detained a crypto-entrepreneur who was associated to an unidentified cryptocurrency trading platform. He is accused of embezzling money and other property. The media reports that the person detained is the owner of Wex, the successor to the infamous BTC/e cryptocurrency exchange.
Russia: Wex Exchange owner arrested
Russian law enforcement authorities have arrested a suspect accused of stealing financial assets and other property from a cryptocurrency exchange. This was announced by the Ministry of Internal Affairs on Tuesday. According to the suspect, he controlled large sums of cryptocurrency as well as their movement among wallets.
Investigators think he may have taken some of the money and retained them. A press release stated that the man was arrested at the Serpukhov airport district in Moscow with two suitcases and 190million Russian rubles of cash. The total amount of the money was $1.7 million.
Officials from MVD, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and Russia’s financial watchdog, Rosfinmonitoring, carried out 29 searches at the residences of the arrested and his accomplices in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and Yalta. Another 50 million rubles, $1 million, €70,000, computer equipment, hardware crypto wallets, luxury goods, and documents were seized.
Although neither the person or the exchange being detained were identified by authorities, Forklog reported that Sergey Mendeleev, CEO of Indefibank, claimed the man was Aleksey Blyuchenko. Wex is a Russian crypto trading platform, and it was founded in 2017. It replaced BTC-e in 2017. Alexander Vinnik was taken into custody in Greece and the latter shut down.
Bilyuchenko’s ownership of Wex was revealed by the BBC. Dmitry Vasiliev was another Russian who held the exchange’s official title. According to the Polish media, Vasiliev was arrested on August 11 at Warsaw’s airport and was being held in Kazakhstan. He was released, and he returned to Russia in December.
In 2018, Wex was sold to Dmitry Khavchenko, a former fighter for the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic in Ukraine who then registered the operator of the exchange, the Singapore-based company World Exchange Services, under the name of his daughter, Daria. Later that year, the exchange was declared bankrupt. A group of Wex users estimates that the losses totalled more than $400 million.
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