Mt. Gox hacker sells another 1,300 Bitcoins on the eve of Christmas, still holding 4,100 coins

The U.S. Department of Justice has charged Russian national Aleksey Bilyuchenko with hacking into Mt. Gox in 2011 and stealing approximately 647,000 bitcoins (worth billions of dollars today). According to recent on-chain analysis data from Arkham, wallets associated with him transferred 1,300 bitcoins (about $114 million) to unknown exchanges within the past week. The related wallets still hold about 4,100 bitcoins, with a total of 2,300 bitcoins previously sold. This incident has once again raised concerns about potential money laundering activities related to the historic leak that led to Mt. Gox’s bankruptcy in 2014. 43-year-old Bilyuchenko and his 29-year-old accomplice Aleksandr Verner are alleged to have hacked Mt. Gox servers from September 2011 to May 2014, stealing customer funds and laundering them through controlled exchanges such as BTC-e, which they operated jointly with Alexander Vinnik, until the exchange was shut down by authorities in 2017. The Mt. Gox hack remains one of the biggest scandals in the cryptocurrency space. It once handled 70% of global Bitcoin transactions, but the exchange was repeatedly hacked, exposing significant vulnerabilities in early trading platforms. Prosecutors claim that the two used fraudulent contracts with a Bitcoin broker in New York to cash out over $6.6 million and transferred the proceeds to overseas accounts. BTC-e became a hub for ransomware, hacking attacks, and drug money. If Bilyuchenko is convicted of money laundering and unlicensed money transmission in California, he faces up to 45 years in prison. There are also charges in New York State court. Verner faces up to 20 years. However, neither has been detained at this time, and Bilyuchenko fled to Moscow in 2017.