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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
By Roger Ver, the founding father of the Bitcoin Cash cryptocurrency.Between April and November 2013, Verner and Bilyuchenko received $2.5 million from BitInstant and Memory Dealers to a bank account of BTC-e’s shell company, the Seychelles-registered Canton Business Corporation, according to the DHS.The wire payments from BitInstant and Memory Dealers were labeled as an “Internet Advertisement Agreement,” but BTC-e did not provide any advertising services to BitInstant or Memory Dealers, the investigators found. The BTC-e operators would also send money from their bitcoin sales through multiple PayPal accounts to conceal their origins, the report says.From March 2012 to April 2013, a crypto exchange named in Verner and Bilyuchencko’s indictment as “the New York Bitcoin Broker,” sent about $6.6 million to the hackers’ bank accounts in exchange for “credit” on BTC-e. It’s not known what firm that was exactly.BTC-e also used the Australia-based forex exchange FX Open and U.K.-based Mayzus Financial Services for transactions with fiat money, the documents say.Unsealing the history of BTC-eThe unsealed indictment also clears the names of several people who previously have been considered by the investigators as Vinnik’s co-conspirators in running BTC-e.According to the previous version of Vinnik’s indictment filed under seal in 2016, the Department of Justice earlier believed that Vinnik had a co-founder, named Andrey Nikonorov, as well as co-owners of the BTC-e shell company, Seychelles-registered Canton Business Corporation, Alexander Buyanov and Stanislav Golovanov.However, the new version of Vinnik’s indictment says that Nikonorov, Buyanov and Golovanov actually did not participate in the criminal activities related to BTC-e, but rather, Vinnik used their identities to cover his tracks, the DOJ attorney Ismail Ramsey wrote.“When conducting business related to BTC-e, Defendant Alexander Vinnik made efforts toconceal his true identity. This included appropriating the identities of Andrey Nikonorov, Stanislav Golovanov, and Alexander Buyanov,” the document reads.Andrey Nikonorov, who was also a co-founder of the ZrCoin crypto project, told CoinDesk today he knew Vinnik but was merely a user of BTC-e and provided the exchange with his identifying documents to be able to conduct a bank transfer. He also believes that Vinnik himself was just an employee of BTC-e who did not come across as a wealthy business owner at all.Russian news outlet RBK talked to Alexander Buyanov for an investigation into BTC-e in 2017, and Buyanov, who was a DJ at a Moscow nightclub at the time, told the outlet he did not know anything about BTC-e before the news of its shutdown and Vinnik’s arrest.Mt. Gox, Silk Road, Fancy BearBTC-e was an exchange powerhouse back in the day, and a big part of its money came from various crimes, the DOJ says. Starting in 2011, the exchange served about 700,000 users and its bitcoin wallet received
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