The hacker group The Infraud Organization, whose case was led by Marat Tambiev, ex-head of the investigative committee of the RF Investigative Committee for the Tverskoy district of Moscow, allegedly laundered 5,200 BTC (~₽10 billion). This is evidenced by the investigation of BitOK analysts.
Earlier, Tambiev was accused of taking a bribe from the lawyer of the criminals in the amount of 1,032.1 BTC ($17.2 million at the time of inspection by law enforcement officers). He kept the seed phrase from the wallet in the “Pension” folder on his personal computer.
At the time of the arrest, the hackers provided access to ten addresses, which in December 2021 received income from their activities in the amount of 2064 BTC.
Subsequently, all assets were withdrawn from wallets. According to the testimony of one of the members of the group Mark Bergman, the real amount of the bribe requested by Tambiev was 2718.6 BTC.
The BitOK investigation began with two wallets containing the investigator’s assets. It all started on January 22, 2022, when 654 BTC was withdrawn from the suspect’s address.
The initial senders of the assets were LuxSocks and Unicc, which were controlled by The Infraud Organization. Then part of the funds was sent to the Huobi exchange.
This process used the Peel Chain laundering scheme, in which the cryptocurrency is divided into several addresses.
On the same day, 2493.64 BTC associated with the hackers were transferred to another wallet. On May 1, the assets were withdrawn to six addresses, one of which belonged to the Wasabi cryptomixer. After that, they did not move.
It was from these addresses that the bribe was paid to Tambiev. At the same time, the investigator received only half of the funds – 1032 BTC out of 2064 BTC. The rest was sent to an intermediate address.
The second stage of money laundering began at the end of 2022:
- On December 7, 500 BTC was moved to a new wallet;
- from December 7 to 10, 300 BTC was distributed equally among three addresses and sent to Huobi under the Peel Chain scheme;
- On December 10, the remaining 200 BTC was sent to two addresses
- On March 17, 2023, the assets were transferred to wallets allegedly belonging to the BitexBit and WhiteBit platforms.
At the time of the investigation, another 532 BTC were sitting idle at unidentified addresses. Analysts have suggested that these funds may soon be in motion.
BitOK also recorded several test transactions on Huobi. Probably, the criminals had a well-established scheme for passing verification procedures on the platform and several spare accounts.
Experts pointed to identical laundering schemes in 2022 and 2023. In addition, some addresses were used multiple times in these two processes. So, part of the funds that were not used the first time was laundered along with other assets in the second run through WhiteBit.
Summing up the results of the investigation, analysts calculated the amount of funds transferred:
- 500 BTC sent to Huobi;
- 259.14 BTC – on WhiteBit;
- 295.13 BTC – on BitrexBit;
- 1032.09 BTC sent as a bribe to Tambiev;
- 532 BTC is still without movement.
Recall that the lawyer Vadim Bagaturia called the expertise in the case of the bitcoin bribe of the Moscow investigator “doubtful”. Having studied the case materials, he found numerous inconsistencies in the documents.
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