Around $450 million in Bitcoin that went missing from the now-defunct Russian cryptocurrency exchange Wex may have been transferred to e-wallets owned by employees of the country’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the BBC in Russian reports.
After the funds were lost in 2018, an embezzlement case was opened to investigate their disappearance. BBC reporters who examined the documents associated with that case found that the Bitcoin may have been transferred to FSB accounts by Wex founder Alexander Bilyuchenko himself.
The Wex exchange was founded as a successor to BTC-e, which had become the largest Russian-based forum for cryptocurrency transactions since its foundation in 2011. U.S. government officials alleged that at least $4 billion were embezzled from BTC-e in the course of its existence. In 2017, a warrant from the United States led to the arrest of Russian citizen Alexander Vinnik during a visit to Greece. Vinnik was thought to have benefited financially from the exchange. Meanwhile, the btc-e.com domain was seized by the FBI.
Wex promised to return some of the funds its clients had lost in their dealings on BTC-e. The new exchange was founded by Alexander Bilyuchenko, who was Vinnik’s business partner, along with Dmitry Vasilyev, who was among BTC-e’s highest-volume clients. Vasilyev was named Wex’s official owner.
In the summer of 2018, Wex clients’ wallets were suddenly frozen, and funds could only be removed from them at a 90-percent loss. It then came to light that an amount of cryptocurrency worth more than $400 million had disappeared from the exchange. Wex’s Russian clients began submitting complaints to the police en masse, leading Russian law enforcement officials to open an embezzlement investigation. After the summer 2018 scandal, the exchange was sold to the family of Dmitry Khavchenko, a former separatist fighter in the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic who is reportedly close to the oligarch Konstantin Malofeev.
In early 2018, Bilyuchenko and Malofeev agreed to use Wex as a foundation to build “a new exchange that would serve as specialized accounting infrastructure to protect the financial and economic sovereignty of the Russian Federation.”
Bilyuchenko later testified that he was contacted by FSB agents around the same time as his negotiations with the oligarch and was even called in for questioning at the agency’s headquarters in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square. In April of 2018, Bilyuchenko said, an individual named Anton demanded that the cryptocurrency exchange founder hand over a flash drive containing encrypted Wex assets. Anton allegedly said that the cryptocurrency in the exchange would “go to the account of the FSB of Russia.”
The BBC described Anton as a former FSB employee; whether he was still working for the agency at the time of his conversation with Bilyuchenko is unclear. In any case, the exchange head said he was placed in a holding cell and kept under guard until he agreed to transfer an amount of cryptocurrency valued at $450 million.
