The Prosecutor General’s Office objected to the Supreme Court’s decision and asked that the venue of the hearing remain the same – Novosibirsk’s Zaeltzovsky District Court. The criminal case under Article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Misappropriation of other people’s property on an especially large scale” against Alexei Ivanov (formerly Alexei Bilyuchenko) was filed with the district court in April. The defendant in the case since childhood lived and was registered in the village of Pashino in the Novosibirsk region for a very long time.
The prosecution alleges that in 2018, Bilyuchenko (Ivanov), as a system administrator of the Singapore-registered cryptocurrency exchange WEX (formerly BTC-e), gained “sole access and the ability to dispose of cryptocurrency on the exchange”. And then blocked access to the trading floor for its owners and other users.
In this way, if the prosecutor’s office is to be believed, the accused embezzled more than 3 billion rubles worth of cryptocurrency for himself. And earlier the investigation claimed that the defendant embezzled several times more, 16 billion rubles.
In June, the U.S. Department of Justice charged two Russian citizens with hacking into the Mt.Gox cryptocurrency exchange and laundering 647,000 bitcoins. One of the two Russians turned out to be Bilyuchenko, who was detained by Russian police in March and had received a new passport in the name of Alexei Ivanov just the day before. Bilyuchenko’s (Ivanov) property in the Russian Federation has been seized. A pre-trial cooperation agreement was signed with the defendant, the terms of which he fully complied with, as well as compensated for the damage, law enforcement officials assure.
The story of what is considered Russia’s largest cryptocurrency scam became the central plot of investigative journalist Andrei Zakharov’s book “Crypta”.