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Showing posts from December, 2020

Russian Man Found sentenced to Prison

Russian man who founded and ran the now-defunct Bitcoin exchange service BTC-e, has been   sentenced   to five years in prison. A Paris court has found Vinnick guilty of money laundering and has ordered him to pay €100,000 (US$121,000) in fines. Vinnick was arrested in Greece back in 2017 under an international warrant issued by the US Department of Justice and was extradited to France earlier this year. The Justice Department accused Vinnick of operating BTC-e as a front for a massive money laundering operation that accepted stolen funds from cyberattacks. Security firm Wizsec previously linked his private BTC-e accounts to funds stolen from  Mt. Gox . If you’ll recall, around $480 million worth of Bitcoins disappeared from the exchange service back in 2014 due to, as Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles called them, "weaknesses in the system." The US DOJ charged Vinnick with 17 counts of laundering up to $4 billion since the exchange was founded in 2011. Meanwhile, French prosecut...