The founder of Gotbit, Aleksei Andriunin, concluded a plea agreement with American prosecutors on Wednesday who will not see him more than 24 months behind bars for his role in what the prosecutors have described as a “wide conspiracy” to manipulate the prices of tokens for paid customers.
Andriunin, a 26 -year -old Russian national, was extradited to the United States from Portugal last month and accused of two leaders of wire and conspiracy to initiate market manipulation and wire fraud – accusations which bear a maximum combined sentence of 25 years in prison. In exchange for a reduced sentence, Andriunin pleaded guilty to the three counts. He also agreed to give up around 23 million dollars in stablescoins linked to his crimes. The government is not looking for any other fine.
In their accusation act last October, prosecutors allegedly alleged that Gotbit was essentially a rental market manipulator, offering washing trading services to crypto projects that wanted to artificially inflate the volume and price of their tokens.
Andriunin’s guilt of guilt is not entirely surprising: it has never been shy about Gotbit’s commercial activities. In a 2019 interview with Coindesk, Andriunin – then a second year student in the Moscow State University – admitted that his business was “not entirely ethical” and detailed how he used robot trading to create a sufficient artificial business volume for a project to be listed in CoinmarketCap.
Read more: for $ 15,000, it will simulate your exchange volume – you will get in Coinmarketcap
Gotbit is not the only market manufacturer to offer these services. At the same time as Andriunin and his company were charged, as well as two other employees, the American prosecutors billed a handful of other companies, including CLS Global, Mytrade and Zmquant, as well as several of the employees and promoters of companies, with market manipulation services for rental.
The date of determining Andriunin’s sentence has not yet been set.
