Record $181 million Bitcoin bribery case brought to Russian court
3 Min Read
A Russian court is set to hear a case involving the biggest bribe in the country's modern history.
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An advertisement of Bitcoin is displayed on a building in Hong Kong, on November 18, 2021. (AP)
A Moscow region court is set to hear a case involving the largest bribe in Russia's modern history, the judicial authority announced on its website on Thursday. The suspects are officers from the Russian Investigative Committee's Moscow district office, accused of soliciting a massive bribe in a 2022 cybercrime investigation.
Court documents reveal that Major Marat Tambiev, one of the suspects, demanded a bribe from individuals involved in a 2022 cybercrime case. At the time, Russian law enforcement was targeting the Russian branch of the Infraud Organization, an international cybercrime syndicate.
The Infraud Organization was involved in various cybercrimes, including trafficking and unauthorized use of credit card data, personal credit cards, online banking information theft, and the illegal trade of such data.
The actions of the four syndicate members detained in Russia in 2022 resulted in damages amounting to one billion rubles ($11.4 million), according to authorities.
2,718 bitcoins
Tambiev, who was the head of his district office at the time, demanded that the hackers hand over 2,718 bitcoins, equivalent to roughly $181 million at current bitcoin prices. This sum is reportedly the largest bribe ever recorded in Russia's modern history.
Another suspect in the bribery case, investigator Kristina Lyakhovenko, allegedly took several electronic data storage devices seized from the hackers and handed them over to Tambiev. Tambiev then transferred the bitcoins stored on these devices to his crypto wallets.
In return for the bribe, Tambiev and Lyakhovenko promised not to confiscate the remaining cryptocurrency assets of the hackers, worth 14 billion rubles ($159.6 million), which should have been forfeited to the government.
The cybercrime syndicate members, who eventually received suspended sentences of two and a half to three years, reported the bribe to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Tambiev was subsequently arrested in March 2022, and both he and Lyakhovenko have denied their guilt.
The Infraud Organization was founded in 2010 by Ukrainian national Svyatoslav Bondarenko. In 2017, the US Justice Department described the organization as the "largest cyber fraud enterprise" it had ever prosecuted, with over 10,000 registered members worldwide, before indicting 36 suspected members of the organization in 2018 for their roles in a "racketeering conspiracy," according to the Justice Department.
