The Department of Justice announced on Tuesday that it has arrested two men in Florida on charges related to a scheme in which they’re alleged to have processed at least $1.8 million for customers through an unlicensed Bitcoin exchange they operated on the Internet behind the supposed protection of a fake company.
Separately, the Justice Department said in a different announcement that it has unsealed an indictment in which three Israeli men are accused of participating in a multimillion dollar stock manipulation scam.
Despite there being no mention of the nation’s biggest bank anywhere in the charging documents currently available for either case, federal officials speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed to reporters with the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News on Tuesday that both announcements are linked to last year’s JPMorgan Chase breach in which hackers accessed data from 83 million accounts.
Officially, Anthony Murgio and Yuri Lebedev have been charged with operating coin.mx, a website in which users could purchase the digital cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Both men were arrested on Tuesday in Florida and charged with conspiring and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said in a statement.
In Israel, meanwhile, Gery Shalon and Ziv Orenstein were also arrested on Tuesday and charged with running a “pump-and-dump” scheme that aimed to manipulate stock prices by sending false and misleading emails to millions of people. Joshua Aaron, a U.S. citizen living in Israel, was also charged over the Wall Street scam but had not yet been apprehended.
A grand jury indictment unsealed against the men accuse them of manipulating at least five stocks in recent years, and U.S. authorities say they will seek the extradition of all three.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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