BTC-e Operator may go to prison for up to 50 years
The ongoing case against the past BTC-e Bitcoin exchange operator Alexander Vinnik may face punishment of 50 years behind Jail.
BTC-e was a popular Bitcoin trading platform, which was primarily targeting Russian auditory with servers located in the USA – until the US govt seized their website & all funds in 2017. In the mid of 2011, Alexander Vinnik and Aleksandr Bilyuchenko launched this exchange. In February 2015, Btc-e handled around 3% of all global Bitcoin trade volume.
Last Friday, The US Department of Justice (DOJ) stated that 42 years old Russian Alexander Vinnik is currently facing a total of 21 criminal charges, which include unauthorized money service business, conspiracy to commit money laundering, money laundering, and unlawful monetary transactions via the BTC-e exchange.
Kenneth A. Polite, Jr, Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said that after 5 years, Aleksandr was extradited to the United States on last Thursday.
“After more than five years of litigation, Russian national Alexander Vinnik was extradited to the United States yesterday to be held accountable for operating BTC-e, a criminal cryptocurrency exchange, which laundered more than $4 billion of criminal proceeds.”
All the leading US investigation agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Homeland Security Investigations, and the U.S. The Secret Service Criminal Investigative Division are taking this case as a priority to find out all the associated bad actors.
In 2020, Aleksandr was extradited to France. At that time, he denied all the allegations and requested to handover to the Russian agencies but they denied. Reportedly, Aleksandr was trying to get out of these investigations because in Russia there was only a criminal charge of $11,000. In the same year, the BTC-e founder was sentenced to 5-year in jail but later he was acquitted of the money laundering criminal charges.
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