July 13, the U.S. Department of justice announced the indictment against 12 alleged Russian officers of the Main intelligence Directorate of the General staff of the Russian Armed Forces (GRU), which used cryptocurrency to intervene in the us presidential campaign of 2016.
As stated in the document, starting from March 2016, the accused had broken into-volunteers and participants of the election campaign of the candidate in US presidents from Democratic party Hillary Clinton to steal information and interfere in the presidential election.
According to the newspaper, to buy servers, domain registration and payment hacking GRU officers used cryptocurrency. In addition, Grushnikov accused of money laundering using bitcoins.
Mueller: Some of the BTC used by Russian intelligence officers indicted was sourced from bitcoin mining. “…GRU’s mining activity was used, for example, to pay a Romainian company to register the domain https://t.co/STZj4pZg0F through a payment processing company located in [US].”
— CoinDesk (@coindesk) July 13, 2018
“Part of the bitcoins used by Russian spies, he was received as a result of mining. The cryptocurrency has been used in particular to pay for the domain registration http://dcleaks.com through payment processing, located in the United States,” — said the former head of the FBI Robert Mueller.
According to him, the defendants bought a bitcoin through different cryptocurrency exchanges, but also using prepaid cards to ensure anonymity.
The document said that they used several specialized accounts email to track bitcoin transactions. In addition, defendants send bitcoin using the same computers as in the e-mail hacking.
Note created in June of 2016 website DCLeaks responsible for the leaks of emails belonging to several senior government officials and representatives of the armed forces of the United States. The site will be unavailable from March 2017.
The prosecution claims that the leaks are part of the Russian military operation and its activities are connected with the Russian hacker group Fancy Bear.
While it is impossible to say for sure whether a criminal case is the impact on the regulation of the cryptocurrency industry in the United States.
ForkLog continues to monitor developments.
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