WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States has indicted two Russian nationals in hacking the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox and operating illicit cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e, the Department of Justice announced on Friday.
The department said in a statement that Alexey Bilyuchenko, 43, and Aleksandr Verner, 29, were charged with conspiring to launder approximately 647,000 bitcoins from their hack of Mt. Gox, which collapsed in 2014. after losing half a billion dollars worth of cryptocurrency.
Bilyuchenko was also charged with conspiring with another person to mine BTC-e from 2011 to 2017, the Justice Ministry added.
(Reporting by Rami Ayyub; writing by Paul Grant)