US charges two Russians in the 2014 Mt. Gox Bitcoin heist

The US Department of Justice has accused two Russian nationals, Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner, of conspiring to launder 647,000 Bitcoins that had been stolen from the Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange in 2014. At that time, the stolen currency was worth around half a billion dollars in cryptocurrency.

The US government is charging Dmitry Bilyuchenko with operating BTC-e, a crypto exchange that is no longer in operation and was allegedly used by malicious actors to launder money. Bilyuchenko is also being charged for working with Alexander Vinnik, who was indicted in 2017 and extradited to the US last fall for his involvement with BTC-e and laundering stolen funds from Mt. Gox. Back then, Bilyuchenko narrowly avoided arrest in Greece by destroying his computer and immediately flying back to Moscow when Vinnik was arrested.

In 2015, Mark Karpeles, the CEO of Mt. Gox, was arrested and indicted in Japan but was acquitted on most charges in 2019.

This incident was one of the early events highlighting the vulnerability of cryptocurrency exchanges to cyber criminals. Since then, the industry has experienced multiple large-scale thefts.