Aleksei Andriunin, Gotbit Founder, Extradited to U.S. for Alleged Fraud Offenses

Aleksei Andriunin, the founder of Gotbit and a 26-year-old Russian citizen, was extradited to the United States on Tuesday to answer charges of fraud. These charges stem from claims that his company was involved in a broad conspiracy to manipulate the prices of tokens for paying cryptocurrency clients, as stated in a press release by the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday.

Andriunin was taken into custody in Portugal in October of last year and later indicted by a grand jury in Boston on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation and wire fraud. The maximum sentence for these charges is 25 years in prison. The indictment also named Gotbit as a defendant, along with two of its directors, Fedor Kedrov and Qawi Jalili, both of whom are Russian nationals.

Prosecutors allege that between 2018 and 2024, Gotbit operated essentially as a market manipulation service for hire, offering to inflate token prices for various cryptocurrency companies, including some based in the United States.

Andriunin was open about the nature of Gotbit's services - in a 2019 interview with CoinDesk, which is referenced in the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Wednesday announcement, Andriunin, who was then a sophomore at Moscow State University, candidly admitted that his business was "not entirely ethical."

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According to court documents, Gotbit received "tens of millions of dollars in proceeds" from their fraudulent activity. Andriunin is accused of transferring "millions of dollars of Gotbit’s proceeds into his personal Binance account."

Andriunin appeared before a judge in Boston for the first time on Tuesday. His next court date has not yet been scheduled.

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