An unknown actor moved 66,143 BTC from the BTC-e exchange’s hot wallet to Coinbase’s trading platform address. This was reported in his Telegram channel сообщил the CEO of Indefibank, Sergey Mendeleev.
Транзакцию was executed on July 25, 2017, the day of the arrest of предполагаемого совладельца BTC-e, Alexander Vinnik.
According to Mendeleev’s investigation, from the Coinbase wallet, using a pre-written script the amount мелкими частями разошлась across thousands of wallets.
Эксперт предположил, что представители BTC-e могли готовиться к арестам и написали скрипт на случай необходимости «быстро замести следы».
“Only someone who held the private keys to the exchange’s wallets could be behind this transfer, and it certainly wasn’t Vinnik, since he was already under arrest at that moment,” said Mendeleev in ForkLog’s comment.
Он отметил, что для всех аналитических систем биткоины после выхода с адресов Coinbase из «украденных» превращаются практически в безрисковые. Последняя активность адреса, получившего биткоины с BTC-e, датирована 26 июля 2020 года.
ForkLog обратился за дополнительными разъяснениями к представителям биржи Coinbase, однако не получил оперативного ответа.
“[If the wallet really belongs to Coinbase], it would have to be acknowledged that one of the largest scams in the history of the industry was laundered right under the FBI’s nose through the same American exchange, which, by the way, this transaction became one of the largest in history,” added Sergei Mendeleev.
Product Development Director Crystal Blockchain, Kirill Chikhradze in ForkLog’s comment confirmed that the sum of 66,143 BTC was transferred to various Coinbase wallets. However, he doubted that the sender address belonged to the BTC-e exchange.
“After conducting a more thorough analysis of the interaction mentioned in the investigation, we are unlikely to confirm that the адрес-отправитель транзакции belongs to the BTC-e exchange. With a high degree of probability, this was an internal transfer of funds between Coinbase wallets,” noted Chikhradze.
The expert explained that this discrepancy could be due to clustering inaccuracy.
“We regularly update and recheck clustering results for the most active parts of the blockchain to ensure that the algorithmically calculated data are correct. Since clustering is heuristic in nature, some labeling error is quite natural, especially in parts of the network that attract little interest,” he added.
In 2017, Alexander Vinnik was detained in Greece at the request of U.S. authorities.
In January 2020, the Russian citizen was extradited to France by court order. In December, he was found guilty of laundering funds through BTC-e, sentenced to five years in prison and a €100 000 fine.
In late June 2021, the Appeals Court upheld the verdict of the first instance.
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