Officials in India Arrest Alleged Garantex Founder Aleksej Bešciokov

Officials with India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) announced the arrest of Lithuanian national Aleksej Bešciokov, who was alleged to have operated the cryptocurrency exchange Garantex.

Officials with India’s Central Bureau of Investigation have announced the arrest of Lithuanian national Aleksej Bešciokov, who was alleged to have operated the cryptocurrency exchange Garantex.

According to a March 12 notice, CBI police in the Indian state of Kerala coordinated with national authorities to arrest Bešciokov, who was vacationing in the country with his family and planning to leave India. The arrest follows US charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business and conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Aleksej Bešciokov’s “most wanted” page. Source: US Secret Service

As stated in an indictment filed on February 27 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Bešciokov, Aleksandr Mira Serda and others operated Garantex to "launder the proceeds of criminal activity, including ransomware, computer hacking, narcotics transactions, and sanctions violations, and profited from the laundering" between 2019 to the present. Bešciokov is expected to be transferred to US custody in accordance with India’s Extradition Act of 1962.

The alleged Garantex founder’s arrest follows Tether freezing $27 million in USDt (USDT) on the platform. Garantex announced on March 6 that it had temporarily suspended all services, including withdrawals. US authorities also seized three website domain names “used to support Garantex's operations” as part of a judge’s order in the criminal case.

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The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control added Garantex to its list of sanctioned entities in April 2022 for "willfully disregard[ing] Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) obligations and allow[ing] their systems to be abused by illicit actors." The European Union also imposed sanctions against the platform in February as part of sanctions on “Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.”

Serda, a Russian national and Garantex’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, is still at large at the time of Bešciokov’s arrest.

A Garantex spokesperson declined to comment.

It’s unclear what legal recourse Bešciokov could have in fighting US extradition from India should he choose to do so. Lawyers for Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon, who was arrested in Montenegro on March 1, 2023 on unrelated charges, repeatedly appealed court decisions regarding US extradition before he was finally handed over to officials in December 2024.

Former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who was in the Bahamas when crypto exchange FTX collapsed in November 2022, was extradited from the island nation to the US to face charges. He was later convicted of seven felony counts and sentenced to 25 years in prison but filed an appeal.