Garantex Operator Aleksej Besciokov Arrested in India: Report

One of the operators of sanctioned Russian cryptocurrency exchange Garantex was arrested in India on Tuesday, according to two recent news reports.

Lithuanian national and Russian resident Aleksej Besciokov, 46, was reportedly arrested by police in the Indian state of Kerala, while vacationing on the country’s southern coast with his family, Techcrunch and KrebsonSecurity reported.

Last week, a coalition of international law enforcement agencies from the U.S., Germany and Finland seized Garantex’s domains and servers and froze nearly $28 million in crypto tied to the exchange with the help of stablecoin issuer Tether. The exchange was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) in 2022, for knowingly facilitating money laundering for ransomware actors, including Conti and Black Basta, and darknet markets like Hydra, the largest such market in the world before its closure in 2022.

In addition to allegedly facilitating money laundering for criminals, including North Korea’s in-house hacking squad the Lazarus Group, which was behind the massive $1.5 billion Bybit heist last month, Garantex reportedly played a large role in sanctions evasion. Upscale sanctions evasion services like the TGR Group, which cater to Russian oligarchs, have been connected to the exchange.

In conjunction with the seizure, U.S. prosecutors charged Besciokov and another of Garantex’s operators, 40-year-old Russian Aleksandr Mira Serda, a resident of the United Arab Emirates, with money laundering conspiracy. Besciokov is currently listed on the U.S. Secret Service’s Most Wanted list.

Neither the Kerala police nor the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) responded to CoinDesk’s request for comment about Besciokov’s reported arrest.