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.
In response to 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 have 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” with a view to get them listed on crypto worth aggregator website CoinMarketCap, in addition to on crypto exchanges.
Andriunin is alleged to have made tens of millions 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 have been charged individually within the October 9 indictment.
On the time, federal prosecutors revealed that that they had charged Gotbit alongside crypto corporations 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 modern know-how—cryptocurrency—met a century-old scheme—the pump and dump,” Appearing United States Lawyer Joshua Levy mentioned in a press release final month. He added: “Wash buying and selling has lengthy been outlawed within the monetary markets, and cryptocurrency isn’t any exception.”
Andriunin faces a most doable 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 area, with Andriunin calling meme cash “the bridge to onboard Web2 audiences to crypto.”
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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