A Moscow court has convicted three former police officers in a large-scale cryptocurrency fraud scheme. Using forged court orders, the defendants siphoned over 30 million rubles from the Garantex exchange, receiving real prison sentences ranging from 12 to 14 years.
The harshest sentence—14 years—was handed to former Lieutenant Colonel Renat Bakhtiev of the special technical measures bureau. His accomplices, investigator Antonina Shakina and operative Leonid Golubev, were each sentenced to 12 years in prison. The judicial panel also stripped them of their special ranks and ordered each to pay fines of 6.5 million rubles.
Details of the criminal conspiracy
The criminal case was opened in spring 2023 after a complaint from St. Petersburg resident Alexander Sazonov, who discovered an attempted unauthorized withdrawal of 24.8 million rubles from his deposit account on Garantex. The investigation uncovered a whole chain of unlawful actions: from fabricating orders to lift asset seizures to directly stealing funds from other exchange clients.
The scheme was fine-tuned to the smallest detail. First, a forged court order from a Basmanny District Court judge regarding asset seizure was submitted to the platform, followed by a document from investigator Shakina revoking it. In a similar manner, the criminals stole 6.2 million rubles from two other Garantex users—Mikhail Korniychuk and Agakerim Gamzabekov. The money was funneled through a shell account, then cashed out at the exchange's office and distributed among group members. Notably, one of the defendants, Lilia Eleshova, escaped punishment—charges against her were dropped due to insufficient evidence.
Context of pressure on Garantex
This verdict is just one episode in a series of troubles for Garantex. In August 2025, the U.S. Treasury expanded its sanctions list to include key exchange operators and related projects, including GRINEX and InDeFi SmartBank. TRM Labs analysts note that after the server seizure, the platform effectively rebranded as Grinex, using a similar interface and operational methods. Global Ledger, in turn, identified wallets linked to Garantex holding $34 million, a significant portion of which has already been paid out to former clients via mixers and cross-chain bridges.
My take: this case is a vivid illustration of dual pressure on the crypto market. On one hand, law enforcement officers tasked with upholding the law become its violators themselves, exploiting bureaucratic loopholes. On the other, sanctions and regulatory pressure only drive such platforms further into the "gray" zone, which in the long run creates even greater risks for users than those they are trying to protect them from.