The Justice Department unsealed charges against two Russian nationals Friday, accusing them of hacking the now-defunct Mt. Gox cryptocurrency exchange to steal what at the time was nearly half a billion dollars in bitcoin
BTCUSD,
and conspiring to launder the proceeds.
The DOJ alleges that Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner gained unauthorized access to the exchange starting in 2011 and over the next three years illegally transferred 670,000 bitcoins to addresses controlled by them.
“As cyber criminals have become more sophisticated in their methods of thievery, our career prosecutors and law enforcement partners, too, have become experts in the latest technologies being abused for malicious purposes,” said Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a statement.
