WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States has charged two Russian nationals in the hack of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox and in the operation of the illicit crypto exchange BTC-e, the Justice Department said on Friday.
The department said in a statement that Alexey Bilyuchenko, 43, and Aleksandr Verner, 29, were charged with conspiring to launder approximately 647,000 bitcoins from their hack of Mt. Gox, which collapsed in 2014 after losing half a billion dollars worth of the cryptocurrency.
Bilyuchenko was also charged with conspiring with another individual to operate BTC-e from 2011 to 2017, the Justice Department added.
(Reporting by Rami Ayyub; writing by Paul Grant)
