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The mystery of the hundreds of millions of dollars that disappeared out of nowhere

A Russian computer programmer involved in the collapse of a large platform of cryptocurrencies says he was tricked into turning over all his assets to scammers posing as agents of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), according to documents obtained by the Russian service of the BBC.

Alexei Bilyuchenko was a key player in the exchange service cryptocurrencies Wex, which stopped operating in 2018, leaving clients without access to its millionaire investments.

The BBC has spent months investigating the murky world of the trade in cryptocurrencies Russian, trying to find out what happened to that money.

This is a story worthy of the television drama of the BBC McMafia, which involves a cast of characters ranging from geeks computer scientists and agents FBI, to a billionaire oligarch linked to the war in Ukraine.

How Two Friends Cornered a Market

The story begins in the Russian city of Novosibirsk in August 2017, where Alexei Bilyuchenko, a former IT manager for a chain of furniture stores, had returned after escaping arrest while on vacation in Greece.

Six years earlier, he and his business partner Alexander Vinnik, a specialist in electronic money transfers, met online and made the decision to work in the trade of cryptocurrencies.

Described by their friends as shy men who preferred computers to people, Vinnik y Bilyuchenko created a digital platform callBTC-e, which in time would become known.

Like other similar businesses around the world, BTC-e offered investors the opportunity to use real money to buy virtual currencies.

But unlike other platforms in Europe and the US, BTC-e it did not ask customers for identification, which means that in addition to attracting legitimate investors, it also offered organized criminals a potential money laundering platform.

Clients flocked to invest in BTC-e and according Global Witness, by 2016 it had become the third platform for cryptocurrencies biggest in the world.

The two partners communicated online and only met in person in 2014, when their daily transactions of bitcoins they reached the US$2 millones.

When they hit $ 10 million in 2016, they held a family party in Moscow.

And in July 2017 they went on vacation to Greece, not realizing that US federal agents – investigating international money laundering – were following their trail.

He FBI I suspected that BTC-e was involved in hiding stolen funds from another exchange bitcoins called Mt Gox.

The experts in cybercrime they also thought it was being used by the mysterious Russian hacking group Fancy Bears.

An arrest warrant was issued against Vinnik and the Greek police arrested him on the beach, in front of his wife and children.

His mother called Bilyuchenko, which was in a different resort.

The man panicked, smashed his laptop, threw it into the sea and got on the next flight to Moscow.

A billionaire linked to the Kremlin

Back home in Novosibirsk, Bilyuchenko decided to try to recover what was lost by creating another exchange platformriptomonedas call Wex (World Exchange Services).

He FBI had taken over the website of BTC-e, but he still had the backup servers and, through Wex, was able to return investments to some clients of BTC-e.

At this stage, according to the version of events that he later told the police, and which was shared with the BBC,Bilyuchenko she decided she needed a sponsor to offer her some protection.

He says they introduced him to Konstantin Malofeyev, a billionaire of Moscow with strong ties to him Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Malofeyev, who made his fortune in investment banking, is currently sanctioned by the United States and the European Union for alleged links to rebel fighters in eastern Ukraine.

In his police statements, Bilyuchenko says he was invited to Moscow several times to meet with Malofeyev in their offices, located in a high-end shopping center.

The issue of how much money was he making Wex was supposedly important in their conversations, as was the destination of the funds held by BTC-e even before the FBI intervened.

“For several months, Malofeyev demanded that I show him the balances of the Wex cryptocurrencies,” Bilyuchencko told police.

Malofeyev flatly denies any connection to Bilyuchenko or Wex.

Who were the men from the “security service”?

By the summer of 2018, business transactions on Wex were declining, and by the end of the year, they came to a complete halt.

The US $ 450 million that Wex had in cryptocurrencies vanished without a trace.

Angry customers began to demand their money back and one of them filed a complaint with the police in the Russian region of Chuvashiya.

Bilyuchenko was summoned as a witness and told the police an extraordinary story.

Said he had lost control of Wex in the spring of 2018, several months before it officially collapsed.

He added that in a meeting in the office of Malofeyev in Moscow They introduced him to some men who were apparently agents of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB).

They took him to a building used by the FSB, not far from the Bolshoi Theater. They asked him about Wex and then took him to the luxurious Lotte Hotel, near the Russian Foreign Ministry, where he says he was kept under surveillance all night.

According to Bilyuchenko, the next morning he was taken back to Malofeyev’s office, where he was strongly suggested to transfer the funds he had in Wex to an “FSB fund”.

That was how on his next visit to Moscow transferred everything requested.

Back home in Novosibirsk, Bilyuchenko says he realized that he had been scammed and that instead of transferring the funds to the tax coffers, he was tricked into transferring them to Malofeyev’s partners.

Since he told the police his story, Bilyuchenko has remained in hiding. Private security guards protect his home and he has refused to speak to the BBC or anyone else about Wex.

Fake bombs and the missing millions

So does Alexei Bilyuchenko tell the truth?

Alexander Terentiev, who heads a campaign group for scammed investors, told the BBC that he was not convinced. But others seem less skeptical.

Since the end of November, courts of law, public buildings, subway stations and shopping centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg have had to stop their activity at some point almost daily because of bomb threats.

According to reports published in the Russian press, several of the warnings sent by email have included references to the millions missing in Wex y a Malofeyev.

According to a statement broadcast on the Tsargrad television channel, Malofeyev described the bomb threats as part of “a discrediting campaign” against him.

“Neither Konstantin Malofeyev nor his companies have anything to do with the theft of bitcoins, the Wex platform or its administration,” he said.

Malofeyev declined to speak to the BBC about the case and the FSB did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

Meanwhile, in Greece, two years after his dramatic arrest on the beach, Bilyuchenko’s former business partner Vinnik is still in jail.

The United States, Russia and France seek his extradition. He has not seen his wife, who now suffers from a brain tumor.

His lawyer, Timofei Musatov, told the BBC that the former bitcoin billionaire, having spent time on a hunger strike, is now a shadow of what he once was.

(Illustrations by Tatiana Ospennikova).

Article originally posted on January 2, 2020

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