The U.S. Division of Justice (DOJ) has indicted the founder and CEO of cryptocurrency “market maker” Gotbit on prices of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud.
Based on a DOJ press launch, Aleksei Andriunin was charged in a superseding indictment, which additionally charged Gotbit and his fellow co-founders Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili, who had been beforehand charged in an October 9 indictment.
Prosecutors allege that between 2018 and 2024, when Andriunin was CEO of Gotbit, the agency artificially inflated the buying and selling quantity of cryptocurrencies by “wash buying and selling” to be able to get them listed on crypto value aggregator web site CoinMarketCap, in addition to on crypto exchanges.
Andriunin is alleged to have made thousands and thousands of {dollars} offering wash buying and selling providers for cryptocurrencies, transferring the proceeds into his private Binance account. Gotbit’s shoppers allegedly included meme cash Robo Inu and Saitama, whose management had been charged individually within the October 9 indictment.
On the time, federal prosecutors revealed that they’d charged Gotbit alongside crypto companies ZM Quant, CLS World, and MyTrade and different corporations, arresting 4, securing plea agreements by 5 people and seizing over $25 million in cryptocurrency.
“These are instances the place an progressive know-how—cryptocurrency—met a century-old scheme—the pump and dump,” Appearing United States Legal professional Joshua Levy mentioned in an announcement final month. He added: “Wash buying and selling has lengthy been outlawed within the monetary markets, and cryptocurrency is not any exception.”
Andriunin faces a most potential sentence of 20 years on wire fraud prices, whereas the lesser prices of conspiracy every carry sentences of as much as 5 years.
In sponsored posts on crypto information websites, Gotbit had beforehand argued that meme cash might carry new corporations into the crypto house, with Andriunin calling meme cash “the bridge to onboard Web2 audiences to crypto.”
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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