The US government has accused two Russian citizens of being involved in the 2011 cyberattack on Mt. Gox, a cryptocurrency exchange that went bankrupt after losing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. The suspects are Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner, who allegedly laundered about 647,000 Bitcoins from the Mt. Gox hack through a shady crypto platform called BTC-e.
The Justice Department also claims that Bilyuchenko conspired with another person to run BTC-e from 2011 to 2017, facilitating money laundering for cybercriminals around the world.
The Mt. Gox hack was one of the biggest and most damaging breaches in the history of cryptocurrency. In 2014, the Tokyo-based exchange announced that it had lost 850,000 Bitcoins (worth over $450 million at the time) due to a security flaw.
Some of the stolen Bitcoins were later traced to wallets associated with BTC-e and its alleged operator Alexander Vinnik, who was indicted by the US in 2017. Now the US alleges that Bilyuchenko and Verner also played a role in the theft and laundering of the Mt. Gox funds.
Bilyuchenko and Verner face charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Bilyuchenko also faces charges of operating an unlicensed money services business, which could add another five years to his sentence. The US government is seeking their extradition from Russia to face trial in the US.
Hackers Face Charges from the DOJ
The prosecutors claim that both Hackers Bilyuchenko and Verner were behind the massive theft of cryptocurrency from Mt. Gox, which was the biggest Bitcoin exchange in the world until it went bankrupt in 2014. Bilyuchenko allegedly used the stolen bitcoins to create BTC-e, a notorious crypto exchange that facilitated money laundering for cybercriminals around the world.
The indictment accuses Bilyuchenko, Verner, and their accomplices of hacking into the server that stored the crypto wallets of Mt. Gox, which had thousands of users worldwide. They allegedly transferred about 647,000 bitcoins from Mt. Gox to their own accounts, causing the exchange to collapse.
