February 15, a number of district courts in Saint Petersburg received bomb-threat letters mentioning entrepreneur Konstantin Malofeyev. This was reported by the united press service of the city courts.
As of now, the messages have been received by the Kolpinsky, Primorsky, Kronstadt, Vasileostrovsky, Petrovsky, Krasnogvardeysky, Oktyabrsky and Nevsky districts.
In the subject line of one letter the unknown author wrote: “Will Kostya come out?”. His further message is also addressed to Malofeev.
“Look at what you’ve achieved with your greed and short-sightedness, and you could have settled it in 2020 at the lows, the message says [author’s spelling].”
“The miner” claims to have sent similar bomb-threat letters to “city courts, schools, railway stations and the orange line of the metro.” In other messages, there are also mentions of “prosecutors’ offices, investigative committees, Roskomnadzor, Rospotrebnadzor, kindergartens, Sberbank branches and the Russian Post,” bridges, Magnit stores and the Hermitage.
No demands were made by the authors of the letters.
As a reminder, a series of false bomb threats across the Russian Federation began in November 2019, soon after the BBC published an investigation into possible involvement by Konstantin Malofeyev and FSB officers in the theft of users’ funds from the WEX exchange (the successor to BTC-e) amounting to $450 million. An unknown “miner” demanded $120 in BTC to be paid to him.
Since the miner’s wallet was created, 0.11 BTC has flowed to it. The latest transfer was dated June 2021.
Subsequently, the funds went to exchange addresses requiring user verification, including Binance, Kraken and Kucoin.
At the end of January, unknown attackers sent false bomb-threat messages to various regions of Russia on behalf of Indefibank CEO Sergey Mendeleev. He linked this to investigations he has been conducting into missing funds from the WEX exchange.
In the same month, Ukraine’s Cyber Threat Response Team CERT-UA discovered a potential link between “the miner from the WEX exchange” and an attack on Ukrainian sites.
Read ForkLog’s Bitcoin news in our Telegram — cryptocurrency news, rates and analytics.