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Moscow investigator will be tried for a bribe in bitcoins worth 1.6 billion rubles

FSS detained Marat Tambiev, head of the Investigative Committee’s Tverskoi district department in Moscow, on charges of taking a bribe of 10 million rubles. A couple of months later it turned out that the suspect had set aside 1,032 BTC for his old age.

Law enforcement authorities gained access to the detainee’s laptop. There was a folder called “Pension,” which contained a photo of a piece of paper with codes to access two cryptocurrency wallets. One held 932.1 bitcoins and the other held 100 bitcoins.

The investigation believes that the head of the SKR department received the cryptocurrency from members of the hacker group Infraud Organization Mark and Konstantin Bergmanov and Kirill Samokutyaevsky. A criminal case against all three was pending against Tambiev, and investigators believe he received the bitcoins last April in exchange for not seizing Infraud’s assets:

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The defendant was found to be in possession of 1,032.1 bitcoins, the value of which on January 30, 2023 is equivalent to $23980843, or 1.662 billion rubles at the then exchange rate of the Central Bank.

The bribe of 1.6 billion rubles is considered a record for Russian law enforcement officials. Deputy Prosecutor General Anatoly Razinkin filed a lawsuit requesting the court to confiscate bitcoins for the benefit of the state.

Infraud hackers themselves will not be punished for the bribe. They received suspended sentences for trading credit card data and have already surrendered about 700 million rubles worth of bitcoins to the treasury.

In early June, it was reported that a criminal case was opened against Emil Khalimov, a bankruptcy trustee from Tatarstan, for extortion of a bribe, part of which he received in cryptocurrencies.