{"id":18317,"date":"2025-03-20T17:20:10","date_gmt":"2025-03-20T17:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=18317"},"modified":"2025-03-20T17:20:10","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T17:20:10","slug":"gotbit-founder-aleksei-andriunin-pleads-guilty-to-wire-fraud-market-manipulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=18317","title":{"rendered":"Gotbit Founder Aleksei Andriunin Pleads Guilty to Wire Fraud, Market Manipulation"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Gotbit founder Aleksei Andriunin struck a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday that will see him serve no more than 24 months behind bars for his role in what prosecutors described as a \u201cwide-ranging conspiracy\u201d to manipulate token prices for paying clients.<\/p>\n

Andriunin, a 26-year-old Russian national, was extradited to the U.S. from Portugal<\/a> last month and charged with two counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud \u2013\u00a0charges which carry a maximum combined sentence of 25 years in prison. In exchange for a reduced sentence, Andriunin pleaded guilty to all three counts. He also agreed to forfeit approximately $23 million in stablecoins tied to his crimes. The government is not seeking any other fine.<\/p>\n

In their indictment last October, prosecutors alleged that Gotbit was basically a market manipulator for hire, offering wash-trading services to paying crypto projects who wanted to artificially inflate the volume and price of their tokens.<\/p>\n

Andriunin\u2019s guilty plea is not entirely surprising: he was never coy about Gotbit\u2019s business activities. In a 2019 interview with CoinDesk<\/a>, Andriunin \u2013\u00a0then a 20-year-old college sophomore at Moscow State University \u2013\u00a0admitted that his business was \u201cnot entirely ethical\u201d and detailed how he used bot trading to create enough artificial trade volume for a project to be listed on CoinMarketCap.<\/p>\n

Read more: For $15K, He\u2019ll Fake Your Exchange Volume \u2013\u00a0You\u2019ll Get on CoinMarketCap<\/a><\/p>\n

Gotbit is not the only market maker offering these services. At the same time that Andriunin and his company were charged, along with two other employees, U.S. prosecutors charged a handful of other firms, including CLS Global, MyTrade and ZMQuant, as well as several of the companies\u2019 employees and promoters, with similarly offering for-hire market manipulation services.<\/p>\n

Andriunin\u2019s sentencing date has not yet been set.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gotbit founder Aleksei Andriunin struck a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors on Wednesday that will see him serve no more than 24 months behind bars for his role in what prosecutors described as a \u201cwide-ranging conspiracy\u201d to manipulate token prices for paying clients. Andriunin, a 26-year-old Russian national, was extradited to the U.S. from Portugal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-18317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}