The ex-head of the largest Russian crypto exchange Wex was arrested in Poland

The former owner of the Russian cryptocurrency exchange Wex, Dmitry Vasiliev, was arrested in Warsaw - he was placed in a pre-trial detention center back in August 2021, but the Polish newspaper Wyborcza first learned about this just now.

The detention took place at the Warsaw airport on August 11, after which Vasiliev was arrested by the court for 40 days, writes Wyborcza. A BBC Russian Service source also confirms Vasiliev's arrest. Poland has no complaints against him, the publication clarifies: the businessman was detained through Interpol, since Kazakhstan has been looking for him for several years.

The Wex crypto exchange is the successor to the infamous BTC-e, which appeared in 2011 and collapsed in 2017 after one of its founders, 40-year-old Russian Alexander Vinnik, was arrested in Greece. According to the US Department of Justice, Vinnik laundered from $4 to $9 billion through military-technical cooperation. He was in charge of the financial affairs of the exchange, and his partner from Novosibirsk, system administrator Alexei Bilyuchenko under the nickname admin, was responsible for the technical part. BTC-e quickly became popular - mainly due to the fact that users did not need to go through any verification to participate in the auction, which was very suitable for cyber scammers of all stripes.

The stock exchange stopped immediately after Vinnik's arrest. To restart it, renaming it Wex, Bilyuchenko, who remained at large, was suggested by one of the major clients of BTC-e, a native of Belarus, Dmitry Vasiliev. The site started working again, but already in the summer of 2018, Vasilyev announced that he was selling Wex to a former Kyiv businessman Dmitry Khavchenko, who fought in the Donbass under the call sign "Sailor". RBC magazine described all this last year, linking Moryachok to the former head of the DPR and Malofeev’s former political consultant Borodai.

The BBC Russian Service, referring to Bilyuchenko's testimony , described that he met Malofeev shortly after the first fall of the stock exchange. According to Blockchain and Litecoin crypto companies, in 2018, 30,000 bitcoins and 700,000 litecoins, which at that time was equivalent to $350 million, left the well-known BBC wallets of the Wex exchange. In the group of former Wex clients, they hope that the criminal case will allow to find out where the hundreds of millions of dollars missing from the stock exchange have gone. In the BBC version (it is presented on the basis of Bilyuchenko’s testimony and an audio recording of his conversations with a man whose voice is similar to Malofeev), Bilyuchenko, back in May 2018, through Malofeev’s mediation, handed over the encryption keys and thereby gave away all the crypto-currency stored on Wex, people who have linked themselves to the FSB. “Neither Konstantin Malofeev, nor his structures had and are not related to the Wex exchange, its management and assets,” his press service said earlier in response to a request from The Bell.