One of the operators of sanctioned Russian cryptocurrency exchange Garantex was arrested in India on Tuesday, according to two recent news reports.
Lithuanian national and Russian resident Aleksej Besciokov, 46, was reportedly arrested by police in the Indian state of Kerala, while vacationing on the country’s southern coast with his family, Techcrunch and KrebsonSecurity reported.
Last week, a coalition of international law enforcement agencies from the U.S., Germany and Finland seized Garantex’s domains and servers and froze nearly $28 million in crypto tied to the exchange with the help of stablecoin issuer Tether. The exchange was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) in 2022, for knowingly facilitating money laundering for ransomware actors, including Conti and Black Basta, and darknet markets like Hydra, the largest such market in the world before its closure in 2022.
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