US and partners arrest two in $389M crypto laundering case

Two men accused of operating a cryptocurrency laundering service that processed more than $389 million in illicit funds were arrested in Georgia on Wednesday as part of a major international law enforcement operation. Ruslan Igorevich Tkachuk, 37, a Ukrainian national, and Alexander Vladimirovich Ledenev, 25, a Russian national, were taken into custody in Batumi and are awaiting extradition to the United States.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania unsealed a criminal complaint charging each man with one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments and one count of sting money laundering. Authorities allege the pair are senior members of the AudiA6 organization, a service that advertised on the Dark2Web cybercrime forum to conceal the origins of cryptocurrency linked to criminal activity for a fee of up to five percent.

According to the complaint, blockchain analysis identified approximately 10,333 Bitcoin, valued at over $389 million, deposited into AudiA6-controlled wallets since the service launched in 2021. Of that total, about 393.39 Bitcoin, worth roughly $19.2 million at the time of the transactions, came directly from known darknet...