US charges, sanctions Russians accused of stealing $17 million from crypto exchanges
A U.S. federal grand jury has indicted two Russian men in connection with an email scam that defrauded American cryptocurrency exchanges out of nearly $17 million. The Department of Justice on Wednesday unsealed charges against the Russian nationals, Danil Potekhin and Dmitrii Karasavidi, accusing them of using a combination of phishing messages and spoofed websites to steal virtual currency from users at three cryptocurrency exchanges. The fraud effort netted attackers $16.8 million from 2017 to 2018, according to the Justice Department. A grand jury returned the charges in February. By directing victims to visit financial websites that seemed legitimate, the attackers duped traders into entering their usernames and passwords into sites under their control. After gathering the credentials from their malicious site, Potekhin and Karasavidi directed funds from those accounts into their own, prosecutors said. The U.S. Treasury Department also announced Wednesday it has enacted sanctions against the two men, forbidding […]
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