More than $389 million in unlawful transactions allegedly conducted in a cryptocurrency money laundering service has led to the June 10 arrests of two Republic of Georgia residents, the inspector general for the federal bank deposit insurance agency said Friday.
According to the office of inspector general for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), Ruslan Igorevich Tkachuk, 37, and Alexander Vladimirovich Ledenev, 25, both living in Batumi, Republic of Georgia, were arrested and charged with one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments and one count of sting money laundering.
Tkachuk, a Ukrainian national, and Ledenev, a Russian national, are now in custody of Georgian authorities, the agency said. The U.S. Attorney’s Office will seek the defendants’ extradition to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
The pair, the OIG said, allegedly operated “AudiA6,” a cryptocurrency money laundering service that the agency said was responsible for laundering more than $389 million in cryptocurrency.
According to the OIG, a coordinated international takedown of AudiA6 and its infrastructure led to the arrests. The agency said the pair’s capture resulted from parallel investigations by the United States Secret Service, Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (“IRS-CI”), Europol, Eurojust, and other international law enforcement partners, including Australia, Canada, France, Georgia, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Poland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
According to the criminal complaint, Tkachuk and Ledenev allegedly are senior members of the AudiA6 organization who manage the cryptocurrency money laundering service and the Dark2Web cybercrime forum.
The complaint references a Dark2Web advertisement in which AudiA6 explicitly offers to conceal and disguise the source of any prospective customer’s cryptocurrency that would otherwise be traceable to criminal sources, for a fee of up to 5% of the amount of funds being laundered.
In a release the agency said that, through blockchain analysis, law enforcement determined that approximately 10,333 Bitcoin (BTC), valued at approximately $389.7 million at the time of the transactions, was deposited to AudiA6 cryptocurrency wallets since the service was launched in 2021. “Using blockchain analysis tools and financial records obtained during the investigation, law enforcement reviewed the sources of funds directly deposited to these AudiA6 wallets. Out of the approximately 10,333 bitcoin deposited, approximately 393.39 BTC (valued at around $19,234,331 at the time of the transactions) were received directly from known darknet markets, ransomware organizations, cybercrime services, and other illicit sources, while additional funds were deposited indirectly from illicit sources into AudiA6 wallets.”
The agency noted that, if convicted, the defendants each face a maximum possible sentence of 20 years of incarceration.
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