Gotbit Consulting LLC, a distinguished cryptocurrency market maker, was sentenced in federal courtroom for prison fees associated to a multi-year scheme to control digital asset buying and selling volumes, in keeping with a June 13 press launch.
Aleksei Andriunin, the agency’s 26-year-old founder and CEO, was sentenced to eight months in jail and one 12 months of supervised launch for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and market manipulation.
The Russian-Portuguese nationwide was extradited from Portugal to the U.S. earlier this 12 months after his arrest in October 2024.
Prosecutors say Gotbit orchestrated a complicated scheme between 2018 and 2024 that concerned “wash buying and selling,” which includes the usage of a number of accounts to create faux trades and inflate obvious market exercise, on behalf of varied token issuers, together with Robo Inu and Saitama.
Forfeiture and company shutdown
As a part of a plea settlement, Gotbit was sentenced to 5 years of probation and ordered to forfeit roughly $23 million in seized cryptocurrency.
The agency, which was based mostly outdoors the USA however labored with quite a few U.S.-accessible crypto platforms, is now required to stop all operations.
Gotbit’s companies included producing synthetic buying and selling quantity to assist shopper tokens achieve visibility on platforms akin to CoinMarketCap and obtain listings on top-tier exchanges.
In a 2019 interview, Andriunin overtly admitted to creating wash buying and selling software program that enabled such ways whereas avoiding blockchain detection.
Cracking down on market abuse
Gotbit is the third market-making agency to be prosecuted for wash buying and selling since 2024. Earlier circumstances concerned MyTrade and CLS International, each ensnared in an undercover federal operation aimed toward exposing market abuse within the digital asset sector.
Gotbit’s administrators, Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili, stay below indictment, with prison proceedings ongoing. In the meantime, the Securities and Change Fee (SEC) has launched a parallel civil enforcement motion accusing Gotbit of securities regulation violations.
The prison case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Christopher J. Markham and David M. Holcomb, with asset forfeiture dealt with by AUSA Carol Head of the Asset Restoration Unit. The FBI’s Boston Division led the investigation.
