WEX ‘Red Admin’ Verdict Upheld by Moscow Court

On March 18th, the Moscow City Court reviewed an appeal by Alexey Bilyuchenko (Ivanov), the system administrator of the cryptocurrency exchange WEX, against a previous guilty verdict. This was reported by journalist Irek Murtazin.

Bilyuchenko is accused of embezzling 3.1 billion rubles of WEX assets. In September 2023, the Meshchansky District Court sentenced him to 3.5 years in prison and a fine of 500,000 rubles.

During the court session, the ‘red admin’ claimed he voluntarily compensated the damage to fulfill “financial obligations to WEX platform users.” 

The victim in the case is listed as Igor Pravdin, an Armenian citizen and current owner of the Singapore-registered company World Exchange Services. Until July 2023, the company’s assets belonged to Dmitry “Sailor” Khavchenko.

According to Bilyuchenko, Pravdin is “authorized to personally receive the funds as compensation and distribute the amounts among the exchange’s users.” The relevant decision of the WEX board of directors is included in the case.

“I hope that Pravdin will fulfill his obligations to WEX users and return their funds,” Bilyuchenko stated in his final words.

After hearing the arguments, the court decided to uphold the initial ruling without changes. Thus, the verdict has come into legal force.

A source close to the legal proceedings told Bits.media that Pravdin and World Exchange Services have filed a new lawsuit against Bilyuchenko in the Savelovsky District Court of Moscow, seeking to recover several more billion rubles.

CEO of Indefibank, Sergey Mendeleev, described the legal process in his Telegram channel as “a pre-scripted spectacle with actors from a down-and-out theatre in the leading roles.”

“Discussing the difference in the amount of damage is simply pointless. The exchange owners were [Alexander] Vinnik, Bilyuchenko himself, and [Alexander] Klimenko. This entire nonsense is concocted solely to fool the real victims—the WEX exchange clients, who are not going to receive a single cent. These people number in the tens of thousands, including citizens from dozens of countries. Their losses amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. However, everything is twisted as if they never existed,” Mendeleev wrote. 

He mentioned the movements of funds (1, 2) during the investigation on wallets linked to BTC-e (WEX) exchanges, as well as one of the Bitcoin addresses that still holds 6,500 BTC stolen from the exchange. However, these circumstances “did not interest the investigation, the prosecution, or the internal security department,” Mendeleev added.

According to him, the last effective way for WEX clients to protect their rights remains filing a civil class action lawsuit. 

Bilyuchenko had been in pre-trial detention since March 2022. Given that a year in detention is equivalent to one and a half years in a general regime colony, he stands a good chance of being released after the verdict takes effect.