After 10 years, hacking suspects to be prosecuted
The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted two Russians for allegedly hacking the Mt.Gox cryptocurrency exchange, which went bankrupt in 2014.
Russian nationals Alexei Bilyuchenko, 43, and Alexander Werner, 29, hacked Mt. It is said that He is also accused of laundering the Bitcoin.
Bilyuchenko is also alleged to have used illicit funds from Mt.
Mt Gox was hacked in 2011. After more than 10 years, the suspect has finally been charged.
Mt.Gox is preparing to repay its assets to its creditors.
connection: Mt. Gox expires creditor payment information registration deadline, prepares to start payment
What is Mount Gox
A Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange that operated from 2010 to 2014. It was closed due to hacking damage, and this led to the custom of “GOXing” when the exchange was hacked or the virtual currency was lost due to erroneous transmission.
Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, commented:
The suspects believed that they could outwit the law by hacking and laundering a large amount of virtual currency, which was a novel technology at the time.
But this time we have revealed their charges. This shows that we have the ability to persevere in pursuing these people’s plans, no matter how complicated, until they are brought to justice.
“The FBI, working with the U.S. government and international partners, will relentlessly pursue malicious cyber attackers wherever they live,” said FBI Deputy Director of Cyber Division Brian Vondran.
Is it also operating a rogue virtual currency exchange?
Bilyuchenko and Verner and their co-conspirators allege approximately 64 bitcoins, the majority of which Mt. It is said that he stole 7,000 Bitcoins (approximately 2.4 trillion yen at the current rate).
He is also charged with laundering most of the stolen bitcoins, primarily through bitcoin addresses associated with accounts on two other online bitcoin exchanges.
In a separate case, according to an indictment filed in the Northern District of California, Mr. Bilyuchenko was accused of operating BTC, an illicit exchange where cybercriminals around the world transferred, laundered, and stored criminal proceeds from illegal activities between 2011 and 2017. -e was running.
The exchange was shut down by law enforcement in July 2017.
By then, it had served more than a million users worldwide and processed billions of dollars worth of transactions. It has received criminal proceeds from numerous hacking incidents, ransomware incidents, identity theft schemes, corruption of public officials, and drug trafficking syndicates.
Various organizations in the United States are participating in the investigation into this case. The Federal Attorney’s Office, the FBI, the Secret Service’s Criminal Investigative Division, the Homeland Security Investigative Service (HSI), and the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigative Service (IRS-CI), among others, cooperated.