By Franklin Smith
According to reports, a wallet that belonged to the Russian Ponzi scheme named Finiko has withdrawn a substantial amount of cryptocurrency. The unknown operators of the wallet have transferred cryptocurrency worth $48 million in this month alone. The digital currency was deposited into different addresses and had been divided into small amounts.
At the time of writing, this meant that approximately 750 BTC had been withdrawn from the said wallet. The news of the transfer was first revealed by YouTube blogger Andrey Alistarov. He revealed that three separate transactions had been conducted worth 250 BTC each and this had occurred since the start of November.
The money had initially been transferred to a single address and was later sent to a different wallet at crypto exchange Huobi. It was further detailed by Crystal Blockchain, a blockchain analysis firm, that the crypto funds had then been divided into smaller amounts and then transferred to several addresses.
According to Alistarov, three high-ranking members of the Finiko Ponzi scheme had ordered these transactions and they still remain at large. Edward Sabirov, Marat Sabirov and Zygmunt Zygmuntovich were close associates of Kirill Doronin, the founder of the Ponzi scheme.
All three of them were able to avoid detention and leave the Russian Federation this summer when the crypto investment scheme finally collapsed. A high court in Tatarstan had confirmed in September that international arrest warrants had been issued for the three individuals.
According to the Russian vlogger, the money was transferred by the Finiko co-founders in multiple transactions deliberately. He said that it was unclear as to why the three co-founders hadn’t been locked up as yet because they were scams. However, he added that the one thing that was apparent is that they are cashing out the money.
Currently, the Russian authorities are working to establish all the facts that pertain to the Ponzi scheme Finiko. This phantom entity successfully managed to lure in thousands of investors by promising extraordinarily high returns thanks to its ‘automatic profit generation system’.
The investigation of the scheme was taken over by the federal Ministry of Internal Affairs because of the large scale on which the fraud had occurred. Kirill Doronin is not only the founder of Finiko, but the Instagram influencer has also been associated with two other Ponzi schemes previously as well. He was transferred to the capital city of Moscow in October, along with two vice presidents of the scheme, Dina Gabdullina and Ilgiz Shakirov.
Furthermore, Lilia Nurieva was also transferred to Moscow, who had worked at Finiko and risen to the rank of ‘10th Star’. Finiko is regarded as the largest pyramid scheme to have existed in Russia after the infamous MMM that had wreaked havoc in the 1990s.
The losses officially registered have gone past the 1 billion rubles mark, which is around $14 million, estimates indicate that the total is probably higher than $4 billion. Chainalysis has disclosed that $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin was deposited with Finiko in 800,000 separate deposits between December 2019 and August 2021 by investors.