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Tim Alper
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Tim Alper
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The Infraud Bitcoin bribery court case has ended, with a Russian court jailing a former top federal agency detective for 16 years.
Izvestia reported that Balashikha City Court, in the Moscow Oblast, found both former Investigative Committee detective Marat Tambiev and his assistant Kristina Lyakhovenko guilty of taking bribes from credit card fraudsters.
Infraud Bitcoin Case: ‘The Biggest Bribe in Modern Russian History’
Russian legal experts have previously called the high-profile affair “the largest bribe in modern Russian history.”
The Infraud Organization was an international cybercrime gang that operated between October 2010 and February 2018. It specialized in credit card-related fraud, also known as “carding.”
Tambiev will serve 16 years in a maximum-security penal colony. The court sentenced Lyakhovenko to nine years in a “general” penal colony.
The court heard that Tambiyev took a BTC 1,032 bribe from an Infraud gang member on the condition that he would not confiscate the group’s own Bitcoin holdings.
Tambiyev is a former Investigative Committee major. He denied all of the charges in court and told reporters that he had been framed.
However, the court ruled against him. It also stripped him of his official rank and handed him a fine of over $5 million.
As part of the deal, Tambiyev agreed not to confiscate the group’s “illegally obtained bitcoin holdings.”
He ”subsequently received half of the illegal assets on April 7, 2022,” prosecutors told the court.
Lyakhovenko was also stripped of her own rank (senior lieutenant) and banned from “holding positions in Russian government bodies for eight years.”
She was convicted of “falsifying evidence in a criminal case” and “bribery.”
“Tambiyev received part of [the bribe] by prior agreement with investigator Lyakhovenko, who falsified evidence in the criminal case.”
Russian Prosecutor General’s Office
Lawyer Organized BTC Payments, Say Prosecutors
The court heard that in 2020, the investigator met a lawyer named Roman Meyer, who “represented the interests” of Infraud members Mark and Konstantin Bergman and Kirill Samokuteyav.
Prosecutors explained that Tambiyev asked Meyer for bribes. Tambiev later “helped initiate a criminal case against thieves who burgled Mark Bergman’s apartment.”
Investigators last year found the private keys to Tambiyev’s BTC stash in a work computer in a folder he had named “Pension.”
Prosecutors also told the court that when the hackers were charged in 2021, their case was assigned to Lieutenant Lyakhovenko.
‘Bitcoin Pension Fund’
During the investigation, they said, BTC 5,212 “was seized.” But Tambiev then suggested to his colleague that they “split the funds in half,” the prosecution added.
In exchange for the bribes, prosecution officials said, the hackers were “spared detention in favor of house arrest.”
Tambiev also gave orders to junior staff that were “aimed at avoiding the seizure of the hackers’ property,” prosecutors concluded.
Lawyers told Izvestia that criminal cases involving Bitcoin and altcoins were “on the rise.” And they said courts should brace for more, “similar” cases in the months and years ahead.
