In summary
- The DOJ charged Gotbit founder and CEO Aleksei Andriunin with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud.
- According to a DOJ press release, Andriunin was named in a supplemental indictment that also charged Gotbit and its co-founders Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili.
- Prosecutors allege that between 2018 and 2024, Gotbit artificially inflated Cryptocurrency trading volume through “washing trades” to be listed on CoinMarketCap and cryptocurrency exchanges.
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has charged the founder and CEO of cryptocurrency “market maker” Gotbit with charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud.
According to a DOJ press release, Aleksei Andriunin was named in a supplemental indictment, which also charged Gotbit and its co-founders Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili, who were previously charged on October 9.
Prosecutors allege that between 2018 and 2024, when Andriunin was CEO of Gotbit, the company artificially inflated cryptocurrency trading volume through “washing trades” to get them listed on cryptocurrency price aggregator CoinMarketCap, as well as on cryptocurrency exchange.
Andriunin allegedly earned millions of dollars by providing fictitious trading services for cryptocurrencies, transferring the profits to his personal Binance account. Gotbit’s clients allegedly included meme coins Robo Inu and Saitama, whose leaders were charged separately on October 9.
At the time, federal prosecutors revealed that they had charged Gotbit along with cryptocurrency firms ZM Quant, CLS Global and MyTrade, and other companies, arresting four people, securing plea deals from five individuals and seizing more than $25 million in cryptocurrencies.
“These are cases where an innovative technology, like cryptocurrencies, ran into a centuries-old scheme of market manipulation,” Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy said in a statement last month. He added: “Money laundering has long been illegal in financial markets, and cryptocurrencies are no exception.”
Andriunin faces a possible maximum sentence of 20 years on the wire fraud charges, while the lesser conspiracy charges each carry sentences of up to five years.
In sponsored posts on cryptocurrency news sites, Gotbit had previously argued that meme coins could bring startups into the crypto space, with Andriunin calling meme coins or memecoins “the bridge to bring Web2 audiences into the world of cryptocurrencies”.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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