47news called Vysotskaya’s lawyer in the capital. As best he could, he told about our interest, but she also said that she knew only one thing, namely, that there was such a person Dmitry Sokolov.
According to the card index of Moscow courts, the decision of the Meshchansky District Court to seize Dmitry Sokolov’s property and monetary assets was challenged several times. From the appeal ruling, in particular, we can conclude that Dmitry’s story is intertwined with another – about how the cryptocurrency was withdrawn from the wallets of the once largest Russian WEX crypto exchanges. And also with the February arrest of one of the owners of this crypto-exchange, who today is charged with “embezzlement on an especially large scale.”
Here the word “large” is not very suitable: on this exchange, as the players say, hung from 4 to 6 billion dollars. We were also told that we should not judge Sokolov by some apartments on the Fontanka and on Kamenny Island.
“He is a dollar billionaire,” they poked us into reality.
Yes, in March of this year, the face and voice of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Irina Volk announced the country’s first criminal case on the embezzlement of funds and property of a cryptocurrency exchange. She also convinced how a certain owner of an Internet trading platform with two suitcases of money was detained in a hotel at a private airfield in the Moscow region. Dozens of searches followed in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yalta. So they went to the neighbor of the greats on 2nd Berezovaya.
The case of the WEX (World Exchange Services) cryptocurrency exchange is the loudest in domestic crafty cyber-trade. The exchange itself opened in September 2017 as the successor to the largest Russian platform BTC-e. In July 2017, the FBI seized the servers of the BTC-e crypto exchange in a money laundering case. In the same year, in Greece, they detained Alexander Vinnik, one of the founders of the exchange, on charges of legalizing $4 billion through the platform. The WEX exchange promised to pay off BTC-e debts. However, in August 2018, it became known about the bankruptcy of the exchange and the suspension of its work. An initiative group of affected customers Wex calculated that the damage exceeded $400 million.