On Thursday, February 13, it became known that Russian Alexander Vinnik was released from an American prison and flew from the United States to Turkey. From there he went to Russia, said Mr. Vinnik’s Lawyer Bukh Arkady Bukh. Earlier it was reported that the Russian was exchanged for the American Mark Vogel, sentenced in Russia to 14 years for drug smuggling. Alexander Vinnik was arrested in 2017 in Greece on charges of cyber fraud, in 2020 he was extradited to France, two years later – to the United States. Details of his biography – in the reference “Kommersant”.
Vinnik Alexander Alexandrovich was born August 16, 1979 in Kurgan. After graduating from school, he moved to Moscow, engaged in various Internet projects. In 2011-2017, he worked in the online digital currency exchange service BTC-e (in 2016, the exchange’s website was included in the register of banned in the Russian Federation).
On July 25, 2017, he was detained at the request of the United States in Greece, where he arrived with his family for vacation. The San Francisco prosecutor’s office charged him with 21 counts, including laundering $4 billion obtained by criminal means through the BTC-e exchange he allegedly founded, cyber fraud, identity theft, hacking the Japanese exchange Mt.Gox, which provoked its bankruptcy, and participation in drug trafficking.
FBI officers seized the equipment of the BTC-e data center located in the United States, after which the exchange ceased operations. In total, up to $9 billion passed through the crypto exchange, through which, according to U.S. investigators, bribes were paid and corrupt connections were financed.
During the detention of Alexander Vinnik in a Greek prison, in addition to the United States, Russia and France also sent requests for his extradition. Russia accused him of embezzlement and fraud, while France accused him of money laundering and extortion through the Locky virus he allegedly spread.
Aleksandr Vinnik denied all charges, called himself a political prisoner, insisted on extradition only to Russia and tried to achieve this by going on hunger strike. In February 2018, he was visited by the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation Tatyana Moskalkova, after which the hunger strike was stopped.
On January 23, 2020, Alexander Vinnik was extradited to France, and in December of the same year, a criminal court in Paris sentenced him to five years in prison and a fine of €100,000. The prosecutor requested ten years, arguing that Alexander Vinnik “is not an ordinary operator, as he insists, but a pirate of international level.”
Taking into account the time spent in prison under investigation and parole rules, the five-year sentence expired in June 2022. On August 4 of the same year, Alexander Vinnik was flown to Greece on a special plane and extradited to the United States the same day, where he faced up to 200 years in prison.
He was held in a San Francisco prison. In September 2022, his lawyer Frederic Belo appealed to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a request to deal with the exchange of Alexander Vinnik.
In May 2024, he made a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money in the Northern District Court of California. Sentencing was set by the court for June 2025. In August 2024, when the largest prisoner swap took place between Moscow and Washington, data on Alexander Vinnik was missing from the US prison database, but he was not included in the deal then.
Source: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/7498219