Gotbit founder Aleksei Andriunin, a 26-year-old Russian national, was extradited to the U.S. on Tuesday to face fraud charges stemming from allegations that his firm participated in a “wide-ranging conspiracy” to manipulate token prices for paying client cryptocurrency companies, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a press release on Wednesday.
Andriunin was arrested in Portugal last October and subsequently indicted by a Boston grand jury on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud, charges which carry a combined maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. The indictment also charged Gotbit itself, as well as two of its directors, Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili, both also of Russia.
Between 2018 and 2024, prosecutors say that Gotbit essentially provided market manipulation services for hire, offering their token price-inflating services to a variety of crypto companies, including companies based in the U.S.
Andriunin was not shy about the nature of Gotbit’s services – in a 2019 interview with CoinDesk, which is referenced in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Wednesday announcement, Andriunin, then a sophomore at Moscow State University, bluntly admitted that his business was “not entirely ethical.”
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According to court documents, Gotbit received “tens of millions of dollars in proceeds” from their fraudulent activity. Andriunin is accused of “transferr[ing] millions of dollars of Gotbit’s proceeds into his personal Binance account.”
Andriunin made an initial appearance before a Boston judge on Tuesday. His next hearing has not yet been scheduled.