Forklog reported that 750 BTC was withdrawn from one wallet used by the crypto Ponzi scheme Finiko. The total amount is approximately $48 million. YouTube blogger Andrey Alistarov reported the news. revealed it was made in three separate transactions, each of 250 BTC from the beginning November.
According to data from the blockchain analysis platform Crystal Blockchain, the money was first transferred to one address. It was then sent to another wallet at Huobi. The publication details reveal that the crypto funds were divided and then transferred to smaller amounts.
Alistarov claimed that the transactions were ordered by three Finiko high-ranking members, who are still at large. Zygmunt Zygmuntovich and Marat Sabirov were close friends of Kirill Doronin’s pyramid founder. They managed to flee the Russian Federation after the crypto investment scheme crashed this summer. A Tatarstan high court confirmed their international arrest warrants in September.
Russian vlogger said that Finiko founders had transferred money in multiple transactions to conceal their identity. It is not clear why they haven’t been locked up yet, as they have been long considered a fraud. Andrey Alistarov stated that money is being cashed out at this time.
Russia’s authorities are working to determine all facts regarding the Finiko case. This phantom entity lured investors in their hundreds of thousands by promising high returns and an automatic profit generation system. The investigation was taken over by the federal Ministry of Internal Affairs due to the scale of fraud.
In October, Kirill Doroniin, an influencer on Instagram who was involved with Ponzi schemes in the past. In addition to Ilgiz Schakirov, Dina Gabdullina and Lilia Nurieva who rose to the rank a so-called “10th Star”, were transferred to Moscow.
Finiko is Russia’s biggest financial pyramid scheme, arguably since the notorious MMM scam in the 1990s. Official losses from the scam amount to 1 billion rubles, which is close to $14 million. However, independent estimates suggest that the total could be higher than $4 billion.
A report from blockchain forensics company Chainalysis shows that the Ponzi scheme received more than $1.5 billion in bitcoin deposits of 800,000 investors between December 2019 to August 2021. It has also claimed the lives of citizens from Russia, Ukraine, and other ex-Soviet countries.