The Bitcoin wallet sent 10,000 BTC to different wallets which further transferred to several other crypto wallets.
In an interesting development, a cryptocurrency wallet belonging to the failed BTC-e exchange has recently come back to life on Wednesday, November 23. The crypto wallet sent a total of 10,000 Bitcoin worth $165 million to two unidentified recipients.
A part of the transaction took place around 08:38 UTC. After this, the wallet receiving 3,500 Bitcoins forwarded 300 BTC to another destination. This was further split with Bitcoins landing into several wallets with no links to any of the known custodial services.
It is also possible that the wallet split the large quantity of BTC into small chunks and forwarded them to addresses of his own. Another possibility is that he sent it to other people and cashed it out via an unofficial over-the-counter broker. The rest of the 6,500 Bitcoins have stayed put so far.
Before FTX, Mt. Gox was the first major crypto exchange to go defunct in 2014 after being robbed for 744,408 BTC. Alexander Vinnik, the alleged operator of BTC-e, was arrested in 2017 at a resort near Thessaloniki, Greece, by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) on allegations of money laundering and other crimes.
Blockchain analytics system Crystal Blockchain said that the wallet which woke up on Wednesday belongs to BTC-e. Russian crypto entrepreneur Sergey Mendeleev, was the first to spot this and mentioned it in his Telegram channel.
Does the BTC-e Wallet Transaction Have a Russian Link?
Just after the FBI seized the servers of BTC-e in 2017 and forced it to shut down, another clone started under the name of WEX. However, a year after the operation, WEX froze all withdrawals and shut down. WEX CEO Dmitri Vasilev later sold this exchange to Dmitri Khavchenko.
However, before and after shutting down, WEX wallets have been drained of millions of dollars worth of crypto. Several users filed police reports followed by the launch of investigations across Russia and Kazakhstan.
Over the last few years, Vasilev has faced major arrests in Italy, Poland and Croatia at the request of the Russian police, however, has been released later on. In his public talks and other chat groups with WEX users, Vasilev has clarified that the control of users’ crypto remains in the hands of the WEX admin. Besides, he also claims that he was forced o transfer all the money to two unidentified officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
next