The US Department of Justice on Friday indicted two Russian men, Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner, for the 650,000-bitcoin hack of Mt. Gox. The two appear to have been charged in absentia while evading arrest in Russia—unlike one of their alleged accomplices, Alexander Vinnik, who was previously convicted in 2020.
Bilyuchenko and Verner are accused of breaching Mt. Gox in 2011, in the earliest days of that original bitcoin exchange's founding. The DOJ says they slowly siphoned out coins from the exchange for three years until Mt. Gox revealed the theft and declared bankruptcy in February 2014. In the meantime, Bilyuchenko and Vinnik allegedly created an entire other exchange, BTC-e, to launder the proceeds of this massive hack. In the years that followed, BTC-e became a giant cash-out point for criminal cryptocurrency of every kind.
The new indictment against Bilyuchenko and Verner offers only a mixed resolution to the case of one of the biggest-ever cybercriminal thefts. By unsealing the new indictment, the DOJ may be tacitly acknowledging that it won't ever have a chance to lay hands on the two men. The indictment against Vinnik, by contrast, was kept sealed for years until he made the mistake of going on vacation to Greece in 2017. After years in prison in France, Vinnik has now been extradited to face charges in the US, where he's lobbying to be swapped for imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
