The Paris Criminal Court has sentenced Alexander Vinnik to five years for money laundering with a fine of €100,000 (~$121,000), per Russian news outlet, TASS.
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Vinnik, who is allegedly the creator of a Russian closed cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e, laundered money via bitcoin (EXANTE: Bitcoin) from 2011 to 2017.
"The court has found Alexander Vinnik guilty of aggravated money laundering and sentenced him to five years in prison," a judge said.
Vinnik was detained in Greece back in 2017 at the request of the United States. According to the US authorities, Vinnik played a major role in the group involved in the laundering of approximately $4 billion in cryptocurrencies via BTC-e.
In 2019, Greece agreed to extradite Vinnik to France and then to the United States or Russia. Vinnik himself denies charges made by Washington and Paris. In 2020 the London-based blockchain analysis firm, Elliptic, found that BTC-e might have been used by Fancy Bear during the 2015–2016 Democratic National Committee cyberattacks.
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