Russian authorities have detained a crypto entrepreneur accused of stealing financial and other assets from a cryptocurrency exchange, announced by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The suspect allegedly controlled large amounts in cryptocurrency and their movement between wallets.
As per the press release, the accused man was caught at the hotel of a private airfield in Serpukhov city district of Moscow region with two suitcases holding 190 million Russian rubles in cash ($1.7 million).
Russian agencies like the Federal Security Service (FSB), Officials from MVD, and Rosfinmonitoring, carried out 29 searches at the residences of the arrested and his accomplices in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and Yalta and seized another 50 million rubles, $1 million, computer equipment, hardware crypto wallets, luxury goods, and documents.
According to the Forklog, the accused man identified as Aleksey Bilyuchenko, co-founder of Wex, once the largest crypto trading platform in Russia, which was launched in 2017 as a successor of BTC-e. The latter closed down earlier that year following the arrest in Greece of one of its alleged operators, Alexander Vinnik.
In 2018, Wex was sold to Dmitry Khavchenko, who then registered the operator of the exchange, the Singapore-based company World Exchange Services, under the name of his daughter, Daria. The crypto exchange later went bankrupt that year. According to estimates by a group of Wex users, the total losses exceed $400 million.
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