Months after the first charges were submitted by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, a new indictment has been filed against the former operator of bitcoin exchange Coin.mx: Anthony Murgio.Anthony Murgio and Yuri Lebedev, the former operators of Coin.mx were arrested due to operating illegal bitcoin exchange.The federal authorities of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation stated that Murgio and Lebedev has knowingly handled the funds which are tied to bitcoin ransomware attacks.
According to the filing, the customers were induced to misleading their banks, “also in furtherance of their unlawful Coin.mx scheme, Murgio and his conspirators knowingly instructed customers of Coin.mx to lie to banks about the bitcoin exchange transactions the customers were executing with Coin.mx, and to state falsely that they were for the exchange of collectible items, and not for bitcoins.”Murgio gained control of a New Jersey- based credit union as a result of which Coin.
mx conducted its activities making it a “captures bank” through which to transfer funds.According to the US Attorney’s Office, the new charges were filed a result of the containing investigation against three other individuals: Grey Shalon, Joshua Aaron and Ziv Orenstein, all from Israel.The three were charged in a 23- count indictment with alleged crimes targeting 12 companies which includes nine financial services companies and media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal.The three of them were also the mastermind behind the cyber- attack on JP Morgan Chase back in 2014.According to the prosecutors, the alleged enterprise included pumping up stock prices, online casinos, payment processing for criminals, an illegal bitcoin exchange, and the laundering of money through at least 75 shell companies and accounts around the world.Shalon and Orenstein have run payment processors IDPay and Todur, through which they collected $18 million of fees in order to process hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions for criminals.
The US Attorney Preet Bharara stated, “We have exposed a cyber- criminal enterprise that for years successfully and secretly hacked into the networks of a dozen companies, allegedly stealing personal information of over 100 million people, including over 80 million customers from one financial institutions alone.The charged crimes showcase a brave new world of hacking for profit. It is no longer hacking merely for a quick payout, but hacking to support a diversified criminal conglomerate. This was hacking as a business model. ”
