FBI
Wanted Co-Founder of Crypto Exchange Wex Sentenced in Russia
Aleksey Bilyuchenko, co-founder of Wex, the successor of the infamous Russian crypto exchange BTC-e, will spend only a couple of years in prison. The Russian, who is charged in the U.S. with money laundering, has been sentenced in his homeland as the only defendant in a case over the collapse of Wex which brought heavy losses to its customers. Russian crypto news outlet Bits.media reported, quoting a Telegram post by journalist and blogger Irek Murtazin.
The mild sentence comes after Aleksey Bilyuchenko, who has been accused in Russia of embezzling several billion rubles in customer funds, sought leniency from Russian President Vladimir Putin while the state prosecutor asked for a less severe punishment which was then reduced even further by the judge. BTC-e, believed to have been used by cybercriminals to store, transfer and launder billions of U.S. dollars in illicit proceeds, was shut down by Western law enforcement in July 2017. Wex which was founded after that, went offline in 2018, causing customers to lose up to 16 billion rubles (over $167 million today), according to one estimate.
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