India arrests Russian crypto-criminal at the request of the US

Geopolitically it sounds quite strange and exceptional when you read it, but yes, this actually happened yesterday. India arrested a man from Russia (who also had Lithuanian nationality) on its territory at the request of the United States. According to the indictment from Washington DC, Alexei Besciokov is suspected of being one of the directors of Garantex, an illegal crypto platform that was tacitly allowed by the Kremlin to provide money to Hamas.

October 2023

To tell this story, we have to return to the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. After the dust settled on that bloody day, governments around the world were scrambling to figure out how Hamas was funded.

https://twitter.com/CPOfficialtx/status/1899823172893159688

Business newspaper the Wall Street Journal discovered that the financing for the terrorist attack carried out by terrorist groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad came via the Russian crypto platform Garantex and was paid in Bitcoin, Ether and Dogecoin. Arrangements were found on Telegram, the originally Russian social media channel. Garantex has been on a sanctions list of the European Union ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, but thanks to an OK from the Kremlin, it continued to operate within Russian borders. As crypto can easily be moved anonymously, it was calculated that around 93 million dollars of the financing for the attack came from Iran.

Offline

The United States, in direct cooperation with Germany and Finland, has by now taken Garantex’s online infrastructure offline and arrested several operators of the platform. A very big executive, named Alexei Besciokov, was still at large but was finally arrested yesterday after setting foot in India. Russia has not yet officially responded to the arrest of their compatriot.