Russia has “started” selling the Bitcoin it seized during a 2023 probe into the Infraud hacker group. The move suggests Moscow hopes to trade over BTC 1,000 for fiat.
Per the Russian state-run news agency TASS, the Russian Treasury has “begun the transfer” of the funds.
Moscow will initially sell off almost $10 million worth of BTC it seized from the former Russian Investigative Committee investigator Marat Tambiev, the news agency confirmed.
Moscow Bitcoin Selloff: Will Russia Sell Entire BTC 1,032 Stash?
Tambiev was found guilty of taking a bribe from the hacker group last year. Prosecutors found hundreds of Bitcoin tokens on his computer and storage devices.
Marat Tambiev during his trial in Moscow Oblast last year. (Source: Vedemostvo/VK/Screenshot)
The former investigator was found guilty of taking BTC 1,032.1 from the group and was jailed for 16 years.
However, bailiffs’ efforts to liquidate the entire BTC 1,032.1 have been complicated by legal hurdles.
Tambiev appears to have divided the coins into several smaller amounts. This means bailiffs will have to file separate court rulings to grant Moscow access to the coins.
Bailiffs have successfully convinced a court to let them sell off the initial $10 million worth of coins. They say Tambiev stored these coins on a Ledger Nano X hard crypto wallet.
The news agency quoted “a source familiar with the case” as stating that prosecutors also want to sell off a further cache of Bitcoin “worth several million rubles.”
They also hope to sell off “several real estate properties in the Moscow region” and a “Honda motorcycle,” the source claimed.
Legal Challenges
Prosecutors’ efforts to sell off the entire Bitcoin haul have been complicated by legal obstacles and suggestions that Tambiev may have passed some assets to family members.
At the end of November 2024, the Prosecutor-General filed a case against Tambiev and his uncle Shagaban Kubanov.
It demanded courts allow much of his property “to be sold” to “the state’s benefit.” The office launched a second case on December 20, 2024.
In 2023, a court in Nikulinsky ordered bailiffs to seize a record total of BTC 1,032.1 from Tambiev’s computers and other hardware devices.
Tambiev is now serving his sentence in a maximum security penal colony. He was also fined 500 million rubles (almost $5 million) and stripped of his rank of major.
His former colleague Kristina Lyakhovenko was also found guilty of accepting a bribe. A court jailed Lyakhovenko for nine years.
A third individual, the former deputy head of the investigative department for the Moscow’s Tverskoy District, Dmitry Gubin, went into hiding. Police are yet to establish Gubin’s whereabouts.
A street in the Tverskoy District of Moscow. (Source: Elisa.rolle [CC BY-SA 4.0])
Prosecutors told the court last year that Tambiev extracted a series of Bitcoin bribes “from 2020 to 2022.”
In exchange, Tambiev helped divert police investigations into the group. He also let the hackers hide crypto funds worth “14 billion rubles” ($137 million).
In July last year, Marina Odintsova, the head of the Kirov branch of the Association of Lawyers of Russia, spoke of a sharp recent rise in “non-cash” bribery using crypto and other assets.
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