Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The US federal government has charged two Russian nationals in connection with the series of hacks that brought down the Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange in 2014. In a press release on Friday, the Department of Justice says it charged Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner with conspiring to launder 647,000 Bitcoins stolen from the exchange, which was worth around $400 million at the time.
The government is separately charging Bilyuchenko for working with Alexander Vinnik — who the DOJ indicted in 2017 — for operating BTC-e, a now-defunct crypto exchange that served as “one of the primary ways by which cyber criminals around the world transferred, laundered, and stored the criminal proceeds of their illegal activities.”
At the time of…