A Russian national residing in Portugal has been extradited to the United States for his role in a wide-ranging conspiracy to manipulate cryptocurrency markets on behalf of client cryptocurrency companies allegedly.
Aleksei Andriunin, 26, was arrested in Portugal on October 8, 2024, and extradited to the United States on February 25, 2025.
He appeared in federal court in Boston today and was ordered detained pending a hearing to be scheduled at a later date.
On October 31, 2024, Andriunin was indicted by a federal grand jury in Boston on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud. The indictment also charges Gotbit and two of its directors, Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili.
According to court documents, Gotbit was a well-known “market maker” in the cryptocurrency industry. It is alleged that between 2018 and 2024, Gotbit provided market manipulation services to create artificial trading volume for multiple cryptocurrency companies, including companies in the United States.
Andriunin was Gotbit’s founder and CEO.
In a 2019 interview, Andriunin allegedly described how he developed a code to “wash trade” cryptocurrencies to artificially inflate trading volume to get cryptocurrencies listed on CoinMarketCap (a website that published information about “trending” cryptocurrencies) and trading on larger cryptocurrency exchanges.
Andriunin and Gotbit’s employees, including Jalili (Gotbit’s Director of Sales) and Kedrov (Gotbit’s Director of Market Making), allegedly marketed these wash trading tactics to prospective clients and explained how Gotbit used multiple accounts to avoid detection of the wash trades on the public blockchain.
Gotbit allegedly made wash trades worth millions of dollars on behalf of clients and received tens of millions of dollars in proceeds in connection with these fraudulent services. It is alleged that Andriunin transferred millions of dollars of Gotbit’s proceeds into his personal Binance account.
The wire fraud charge provides for a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, up to three years of supervised release, a fine of up to $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss from the offence, restitution and forfeiture.
The charge of conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud provides for a sentence of up to five years in prison, up to three years of supervised release, a fine of up to $250,000 to twice the gross gain or loss from the offence, restitution and forfeiture.
