Gotbit founder and CEO Alexey Andryunin was sentenced to eight months in prison after U.S. prosecutors said his platform facilitated millions of dollars in fraudulent trades.
Alexey Andryunin, 26, who is a citizen of Russia and Portugal, was arrested in Portugal in October 2024 and extradited to the United States in February. In March of this year, he entered into a plea agreement with the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts on charges of wire fraud and cryptocurrency market manipulation.
In a 2019 interview, Andryunin described how he created code to “launder” digital assets to artificially inflate trading volume and list them on CoinMarketCap and larger cryptocurrency exchanges, according to U.S. prosecutors.
Gotbit employees promoted this laundering tactic to potential customers and explained how the platform uses multiple s to avoid detection of illegal trades on the public blockchain.
Gotbit made millions of dollars in such transactions on behalf of clients and received tens of millions of dollars in payments from them, prosecutors said after the sentencing.
Gotbit itself, by court order, will not be able to operate for the next five years.
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International journalist. Before working in Happy Coin News wrote news on economic topics for St. Petersburg media. Experience working with cryptocurrency topics since 2020.
Julia
Why are we so afraid to change our lives - even when everything around us screams that it's time? 🤔 Andryunin's story is exactly about this. It would seem that he has a successful business, millions, but everything is built on an illusion. Perhaps, at some point he also understood that he had gone too far, but was afraid to change everything. Fear of the unknown pushes even smart people to make a choice not towards freedom, but towards control. Sad, but very instructive.