Two people have been charged in the United States for allegedly using a sophisticated scheme to defraud and steal $17 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum from users of three cryptocurrency exchanges around the world, the target exchanges being: Binance, Poloniex, and Gemini.

Binance, Poloniex, and Gemini users target globally:

The fact that the trading platform is large and famous and has a large trading volume is a positive thing and attracts many new users to it, but on the other hand it carries more security threats that lurk in the users’ money collected in the platform.

The US Department of Justice announced last week that two Russian nationals have been charged with crimes in connection with an alleged conspiracy to defraud three cryptocurrency exchanges and their customers with at least $16.8 million worth of cryptocurrency.

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According to show The US Department of Justice accused “Daniel Butkhin” aka “cronuswar” and “Dmitriy Karasvedi” of stealing at least $16,876,000 in fiat and cryptocurrency from users of cryptocurrency exchanges Binance, Poloniax, and Gemini.

The two accused created several web domains that mimic cryptocurrency exchanges in 2017.

Using phishing and fraud tactics, they fraudulently obtained the login credentials of more than 150 users of the above-mentioned trading platforms, including email addresses, passwords and other personal information.

This allowed them to access the victims’ accounts on real trading platforms.

Besides stealing the victims’ cryptocurrency, Putkhin and Karasvedi have engaged in GAS crypto price manipulation in what the indictment describes as a sophisticated scheme to manipulate the market that began in July 2017 using stolen users’ credentials.

Using more than $5 million worth of funds in the accounts of three victims, the defendants purchased a large amount of GAS digital currency, causing the price of the coin to skyrocket.

These scammers then quickly converted their coins into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, causing the price of GAS to plummet, leaving victims with worthless coins.

The Ministry of Justice accused these fraudsters of laundering the proceeds of theft and trying to hide the nature and source of the digital currency by converting it in a complex and multi-layered manner.

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In the end, a large amount of the stolen digital currency was deposited into the “Karasvedi” account.

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The Department of Justice said Botkin and Karasavidi are charged with conspiracy to commit computer fraud and abuse, computer fraud, conspiracy to commit Internet fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and two counts of identity theft.

Dave Anderson, the US Attorney for the Northern District of California, explained:

The legal maximum penalty for all charges against the defendants is 59 years in prison.

The US attorney general is seeking to confiscate cryptocurrencies and dollars allegedly belonging to the defendants’ crimes.

All confiscated assets are now in the custody of the US security forces.

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