The mysterious business exchanger business exchanger, the battles of marketplaces for the preset and miracles of online voting

The theme of release is how the business Suex was arranged, a Russian project that fell under the first American cryptosanctions in history

It seems that in the near future, Russia will be able to claim a new global brand: “Russian crypto launders” can be added to the “Russian hackers”. The US Department of Finance laid the beginning this week, introducing the first sanctions in the history of the cryptocurrency company - the Suex exchanger founded by the Russians, which, according to Washington, helped hackers and cyber abdominal money, and at the same time made the payments of the largest Hydra drugs in Russia. We figured out the business of the mysterious crypto exchanger and the biographies of its founders.

What's happened

On Tuesday, the American authorities, fulfilling a promise to fight the launders of hacker revenues given after hacking the operator of the largest Colonial Pipeline oil pipeline in the United States, for the first time in history imposed sanctions against a cryptocurrency company. The crypto exchanger (surprise) that came under sanctions turned out to be Russian. It's about the Suex OTC SRO platform, registered in the Czech Republic and having an office in Moscow City and several physical exchangers in Russian cities. Almost all the shareholders and leaders of Suex are Russians.

According to the US Treasury, Suex "contributed to operations related to illegal income from at least eight methods of extortion." For three years, $ 481 million received from illegal operations passed through the platform. More than 40% of transactions on the platform are associated with criminal activity, added in the department. Sanctions provide for blocking the company's assets in the United States. In addition, citizens of the country are prohibited from interacting with the service.

For the United States, attacks by robbers have recently become a problem of national scale. In early May, hackers attacked the Colonial Pipeline pipeline, which is why a gasoline crisis began in the country. Behind the hacking, there was a young group at that time Darkside, which immediately found a “Russian trace”: people from Russia and Eastern Europe are working in Darkside, and a grouping in countries where they do not speak Russian is working. The group is known as professional and very effective - the amount of redeems received is estimated by tens of millions of dollars a year. We talked about her business and principles in detail here .

In early July, US President Joe Biden discussed the issue of attacking hackers at a call with Vladimir Putin, asked Russia to stop such attacks and warned that the United States would take measures to protect people and critically important infrastructure. The first thing that the American authorities took up seriously was cryptocurrency services with which hackers received rewards from attacked companies. In July, Bloomberg reported that the United States authorities tightened control over cryptototransactions, and a special commission for combating hackers using ransomware viruses appeared in the White House. Suex was the first major victim - again, the company with a very noticeable “Russian trace”.

What is known about SUEX

Suex crypto exchanger, as follows from OFAC documents, is registered at two addresses. One of them is in Prague, and the second-in Moscow City, in Lux Q on the 31st floor of the Federation Tower. The Blog of Chainalysis, which tracks the transaction in the blockchain and has helped in the investigation of the US Treasury, tells in detail how the SUEX business has been arranged since 2018.

SUEX is called an over -time broker of cryptocurrencies - this is not an exchange that has centralized management and where users keep accounts to buy and sell cryptocurrency, and a platform where users bring cash and cryptocurrency and exchange them. That is, in simple words, a crypto exchanger. For such a business, the presence and location of offline offices is a fundamentally important point: all transactions were carried out with large customers, and in order to exchange, their personal presence in one of the offices of the company was required, researchers write.

The investigation showed that the platform converted the cryptocurrency in cash in departments in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as, possibly, in other offices in Russia and the Middle East. In Prague, the company was registered only legally - nothing is known about its physical presence there.

Chainalysis calls a Suex platform for laundering money. Another company, TRM Labs, which also engaged in blockchain analytics, wrote that Suex either intentionally or, unknowingly, took an important place in the cashing market for illegally obtained cryptocurrencies. It was possible to become a client of SUEX only on the recommendation - an accidental person could not get there. Communication with clients went through Telegram, but the deal could be concluded only personally by arriving at the office. The company worked only with large checks, the minimum allowable transaction was $ 10 thousand, writes TRM. The company itself did not keep cryptocurrency, but instead used the infrastructure of a large crypto -tank - this helped to quickly and cheaper to conduct transactions, researchers write.

According to the source of The Bell in the cryptocurrency market, Suex, like other similar exchangers in Moscow City, was quite in great demand. Cash there fell mainly from Moscow markets, such as a "gardener" or a market in Lublin. Each of them has a cash receipt, where they are recalculated and taken to the exchange. Entrepreneurs themselves in the cryptocurrency markets need to pay with sellers abroad, for example in China. Products across the border are often imported at low prices, and in order to make real payment, you need cryptocurrency - Tether stabilcoins (USDT).

The crypto exchanger practically did not check the sources of the money of his customers, says the interlocutor of The Bell in the market. The same, until recently, was indirectly stated in the profile on LinkedIn one of the founders of the platform: he promised that a transaction in Suex would take less than 24 hours - without long proceedings and confirming documents.

Due to access to a large flow of cash and connections with a large exchange, Suex was able to bring the volume of cashing out illegally obtained cryptocurrencies to threatening scale, TRM wrote . With which exchanges Suex could work with, it was not specified, but after entering the company to the sanctions list, it became known that it used Binance and Huobi exchanges accounts.

According to CHAINALYSIS, since its founding in 2018, Suex has transferred cryptocurrency to hundreds of millions of dollars, mainly in bitcoins, Ethereum and Tether, and most of the funds came from illegal and highly risk -made sources. Only transactions with bitcoins amounted to $ 481 million, and the researchers estimated all operations with racers and participants in Darknet at $ 160 million. In another analytical company-Elliptic, the estimates were even higher: $ 370 million illegal transactions and $ 900 million in total.

In the structure of illegal operations, about $ 13 million, according to Chainalysis, I had to operate operators-robbers, and another $ 24 million-came from the recently collapsed Finiko pyramid (we told its history in detail here ). SUEX received more than $ 20 million from Hydra, the largest Russian-speaking darknn market for drug trafficking. Another $ 50 million-from the addresses placed on the BTC-E cryptocurrency exchange blocked in the United States (the exciting history of the fall of this once largest Russian crypto-tank can be found here and here ). It is interesting that the BTC-E cryptocurrency transactions continued even after it collapsed, and the assets were frozen, the researchers write. You can see a more detailed distribution of illegal transactions here .

Who is for suex

The largest shareholder of Suex, Russian Yegor Petukhovsky, now, according to Facebook, lives in Zurich. He denies the connection of his business with any illegal activity: on his page on the social network, Petukhovsky called the news about Suex “discrediting” and stated that he intended to defend his name in court in the United States.

Petukhovsky is a serial entrepreneur. In the mid-2000s, he started with the development of sites in the company Art of Web, then, according to his own blog, he began to build a “group of companies”, which was engaged in everything in a row-from oil products and games for social networks to a school of foreign languages, which proposes to learn the language for 16 lessons with polyglot. And in 2014 he created the company m4Bank.ru, which made payment devices for banks, and is now called the "Center for Corporate Technologies".

Suex Petukhovsky founded in 2018, as he himself described on the blog (now this page is deleted and you can only see it in the archive). First, his acquaintance Ivan Petukhovsky (according to both, they are not relatives, but namesakes), the co -founder of the Exmo cryptocurrency exchange, told him about the purchase of cryptocurrencies. And then “everything changed when my partner in Art of Web Maxim brought to our Ildar office, a very positive and cheerful person,” wrote Yegor Petukhovsky. Maxim, according to TRM, is another probable SUEX investor. The investigators call two surnames: Subbotin and Kurbangaleev - as if this is one person, but this is not so.

Maxim Subbotin is a lawyer, his Law Firm Trimfin is registered in the same Tower of the Federation in Moscow City and, judging by the vacancies , specializes in matters related to the purchase and sale of cryptocurrencies. Maxim is a native of Kazan, who founded Blockchain Club there, cryptocurrency courses and trading. And also - the founder of the Finstore microcredit organization, which the Central Bank included in the list of illegal creditors and financial pyramids.

Ildar, which is discussed on the blog of Petukhovsky, is Ildar Zakirov, an Office Trader from Kazan and another co -founder of Suex, which publicly associated himself with the company. He was called by Petukhovsky “man-man”: it was with the arrival of Kovirov that the Suex business began, he managed to find the first client, and as a result of the transaction, the company earned decent money-0.4826 BTC. “All piquancy was that Ivan [Petukhovsky. - approx. Editorial] was busy and could not engage in our transactions, providing a mechanism for replenishing the account on Exmo, and Ildar, who did not even have the slightest experience with the exchange at that time, had to make a purchase of cryptocurrencies in real time, putting the order for the purchase right on the exchange, ” wrote Yegor Petukhovsky. Interestingly, after introducing SUEX to the EXMO sanctions list, she said that she had no connection with Suex.

In addition, the leaders of the Suex are called the Czech venture capitalist Tibor Bokor and Russian Vasily Zhabykin. The latter owns 10% of the exchanger shares. Zhabykin confirmed The New York Times his connection with Suex. According to him, the company was created to develop software for the financial industry. Jabykin denies any illegal activity and believes that the US Treasury mistakenly aimed at the company. In addition to Suex, Zhabykin led NEO Bank, an experimental subsidiary of MTS Bank. But after this story he was predictably fired . Kommersant wrote with reference to the source that this decision was dictated exclusively by US sanctions.

Yegor Petukhovsky had to part with his other project. In addition to the crypto exchanger, he was the director of listing in the popular Telegram bout for the exchange of Chatex cryptocurrencies. After the sanctions, he had to get out of this business. Whether this will help Chatex is unknown - although these companies are not formally connected, they have “vast corporate and legal relations,” writes TRM: for example, both at different times belonged to the Estonian Izibits company.

But the story may not end there either: according to Kommersant, the Stopnarcot movement has already filed applications to the Central Bank and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which described the Suex connection with EXMO, the QIWI group and the Ukrainian Bank of Concord, which allowed SUEX to make payments for the HYDRA narcotic marketplace, the turnover of which is $ 1.5 billion a year.

Markets

The marketplaces have a conflict due to the law on the pre-installation of applications

Between the Russian online retailers, war brews due to the law on the preset of Russian applications to smartphones. For marketplaces, it will become mandatory in March 2022. The government has already developed the rules according to which the application of one, maximum - two players will be preinstalled to all smartphones of Russians. Retailers who are afraid not to get into this list are unhappy-members of the Association of Companies of Trade Company (Akit) asked the Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko to discuss the situation with them, expressing the fear that the law would give an additional advantage to a separate player already occupying a leading position. " Unofficially, they say that we are talking about Wildberries - and Wildberries himself replies that participants “with a pronounced conflict of interests” block the initiative about the pre -installation of applications. We talked about this conflict in detail here .

ELECTIONS

Why did online voting on the blockchain turn out to be so opaque

The biggest question for the elections last weekend is the results of electronic voting in Moscow, which so much dispersed with the results on the participants. But in a week to understand whether the results were falsified, and if so, how, we could not. The public headquarters on the observation of the elections, having counted the voices, did not find signs of hacking and stuffing and confirmed the correctness of the votes. And by the next election, a general unified system for all regions will have to appear, Ella Pamfilova said .

The problem is that we, most likely, would not get a reliable answer about what happened in these elections: experts have long warned that the main problem of this system was in its complete closedness for external observers. The authorities advertised the vote as protected from fakes thanks to the mechanics of the blockchain - but in fact, the system, which only has a Moscow government, lacks the main quality of the blockchain: a distributed network in which each of the participants can check any operation. The most detailed analysis of electronic voting numbers and the followers of the analyst made a “jellyfish” (recognized as an ino -agent) - if you want to understand in detail, we are very advised to read it.

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