Gotbit Consulting LLC, an eminent manufacturer of cryptocurrency markets, was sentenced to the federal court for criminal charges linked to a multi-year program to manipulate volumes of digital asset trading, according to a press release on June 13.
Aleksei Andriunin, the founder and CEO of the 26 -year -old company, was sentenced to eight months in prison and a year of supervised liberation for conspiracy in order to commit wired fraud and market manipulation.
The Russian-Portuguese national was extradited from Portugal to the United States earlier this year after his arrest in October 2024.
The prosecutors claim that Gotbit orchestrated a sophisticated program between 2018 and 2024 which involved “washing trade”, which involves the use of several accounts to create false trades and inflate the activity of the apparent market, in the name of various token transmitters, including Robo Inu and Saitama.
Confiscation and closure of companies
As part of a advocacy agreement, Gotbit was sentenced to five years of probation and sentenced to losing around 23 million dollars in cryptocurrency seized.
The company, which was based outside the United States but has worked with many cryptography platforms accessible to the United States, is now necessary to stop all operations.
Gotbit services included the generation of artificial negotiation volume to help client tokens to obtain visibility on platforms such as CoinMarketCap and make lists on high -level exchanges.
In a 2019 interview, Andriunin openly admitted to having developed a Wash trading software which allowed such tactics while avoiding the detection of the blockchain.
Retraction of market abuses
Gotbit is the third market manufacturing company to be continued for Washing Trading since 2024. The previous cases involved MyTrade and CLS Global, both taken care of in an infiltrated federal operation aimed at exposing market abuses in the digital asset sector.
The administrators of Gotbit, Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili, remain under the accusation, the criminal procedures in progress. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched a parallel action for the application of the civil law accusing the clip of violations of the securities law.
The criminal affair was prosecuted by assistant prosecutors of the United States Christopher J. Markham and David M. Holcomb, with the confiscation of assets managed by Ausa Carol Head of the asset recovery unit. The FBI Boston division conducted the investigation.
