Russian agency arrested 14 members of Ransomware group

Russian enforcement agencies achieved another success by arresting 14 members of Ransomware groups.

Russia is a crypto-friendly country, however, rules are very strict and the government of Russia doesn’t want to see crypto Circulation in the Russian Federation. But still, laws are giving legal status to all the crypto assets to trade under the restriction to not to use in payment. Besides all these things, Russia is popular for its talented hackers. These hackers include white hat Hackers and Blackhat. Black hat hackers are also involved in Ransomware groups.  Bad actors are surging rapidly in the crypto industry because they are getting better options to remain anonymous against illicit activities. 

On 14 Jan January, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) informed publicly that they introduced many raids in the capital Moscow, St. Petersburg, Leningrad, and Lipetsk. The main goal of these raids was to catch the bad actors. FSB conducted this raid under collaboration with the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Total raid by these agencies was conducted at more than 25 precise locations and that ended up in detention of 14 bad actors, who were involved in many illicit crimes like Money Laundering, Ransomware attacks, etc.

Officers collected a  total of $5.6 million funds from these bad actors, which includes $600,000 and €500,000 worth of crypto assets. 

“As a result of the joint actions of the FSB and the MVD, the organized criminal community ceased to exist, the information infrastructure used for criminal purposes was neutralized.,” FSB press release stated

FSB also noted that arrested people were mainly involved in the development of malicious links to facilitate fraud activities in banks.

Agency also stated that illegal activities of these people were involved in the theft of foreign bank accounts also, where they were using  “illegal circulation of means of payment and documented illegal activities.”

Read also: OSC crackdown on Unregistered crypto exchanges, like Bitfinex