Moscow released the American detainee Marc Fogel in an exchange involving a Russian computer expert who had been arrested in the U.S. on suspicion of laundering billions through the digital currency Bitcoin, it has been reported. Following the release of Fogel, there was speculation that the detained Russian the Kremlin said he had been swapped for was Alexander Vinnik, who had pleaded guilty in a San Francisco federal court in 2024 on 21 counts of money laundering. The New York Times reported Wednesday that the U.S. would release Vinnik in "exchange" for Fogel, according to an unnamed U.S. official with knowledge of the matter. Newsweek is not able to verify this report but the Kremlin has said a Russian would be returned to the country in the coming days, and speculation the figure involved is Vinnik has been mounting.
The United States will release Russian Alexander Vinnik, a suspected cybercrime kingpin, as part of an exchange with Russia that freed Marc Fogel, a U.S. official said on Wednesday. Vinnik operated BTC-e, once one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges. He was arrested in 2017 in a small beachside village in northern Greece and detained at Washington's request on suspicion of laundering $4 billion through the exchange. U.S. authorities also linked him to the failure of Mt. Gox, a Japan-based bitcoin exchange that collapsed in 2014 after being hacked. Vinnik "obtained" funds from the hack of Mt. Gox and laundered them through BTC-e and Tradehill, another San Francisco-based exchange he owned, the Justice Department said in a statement at the time. Vinnik was initially extradited to France and later to the U.S., where he pleaded guilty in May 2024 to conspiracy to commit money laundering.
President Trump swapped Russian prisoner Alexander Vinnik in exchange for the release of American teacher Marc Fogel, an administration official confirmed to The Post Wednesday. Vinnik was arrested back in 2017 in Greece and extradited to France and the US to face charges of fraud and money laundering. For six years prior to Vinnik’s arrest, he had been in charge of the BTC-e cryptocurrency exchange — which funneled more than $9 billion worth of transactions. In December 2020, Vinnik was convicted by a French court of money laundering and sentenced to five years in prison. In May 2024, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering before a San Francisco federal judge. Vinnik had not registered BTC-e in the US as a money services business, despite having several customers in America, and the DOJ had said his case showed just how far the department could reach to thwart cybercrime around the world.
