The Division of Justice has indicted Aleksei Andriunin, founder and CEO of crypto monetary companies agency Gotbit, on fees of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation.
Andriunin, a Russian nationwide residing in Portugal, allegedly orchestrated a scheme to artificially inflate buying and selling volumes for shopper crypto corporations, together with a number of based mostly within the US. He was arrested on Oct. 16.
The indictment, filed within the District of Massachusetts, additionally fees Gotbit and two of its administrators, Qawi Jalili and Fedor Kedrov, who had been named in a earlier indictment unsealed earlier this month.
Prosecutors allege that Gotbit, which marketed itself as a “meme coin market maker,” used “wash buying and selling” strategies from 2018 via 2024 to govern market exercise, enabling cryptocurrencies to safe listings on platforms like CoinMarketCap and main exchanges.
Memecoins, usually based mostly on web memes, can shortly rise in worth however are inclined to expertise sharp declines, a pattern that Gotbit allegedly exploited to draw new shoppers.
Courtroom paperwork declare that Andriunin developed software program particularly designed to hold out wash trades, creating deceptive buying and selling exercise to deceive traders and exchanges. The indictment additionally alleges that Gotbit’s workers marketed these companies to shoppers, highlighting their strategies for evading detection on public blockchains.
Gotbit reportedly facilitated hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in wash trades and earned tens of hundreds of thousands from these practices, with Andriunin allegedly transferring vital sums into his private Binance account.
The fees additionally spotlight Gotbit’s position in concentrating on memecoin traders via what prosecutors describe as “pump and dump” schemes. These schemes concerned inflating a token’s buying and selling quantity to attract in traders earlier than promoting off holdings at a revenue, usually leaving traders at a loss.
Prosecutors cited Operation Token Mirrors, a DOJ investigation that concerned making a pretend digital token to look at manipulation techniques, as a part of the proof gathered within the case.
If convicted, Andriunin may resist 20 years in jail for wire fraud, along with fines, restitution, and forfeiture. The conspiracy cost carries a most sentence of 5 years. Sentencing can be decided by a federal choose based mostly on the U.S. Sentencing Pointers.
