Former Wex Exchange Officer Faces Accusations in the US

Polish officials have agreed to hand over the former CEO of WEX, once Russia’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, to the United States.

The Russian citizen was arrested in Warsaw at the end of 2024 at a US request issued within a criminal case regarding alleged fraud and money laundering.

Former Wex Exchange Officer Faces Accusations in the US

Polish authorities have approved the US to hand over Dmitry Vasiliev, the former director of the now-repeated Russian digital asset exchange WEX, the Russian official news agency reported late Thursday, citing his lawyer, Alexander Surzin.

In an interview, Surtzhin explained that Russian citizens will be transferred to US custody as part of a lawsuit taken over by WEX as part of a lawsuit launched against Alexander Vinnik, the co-founder of the infamous BTC-E exchange. The lawyer told Tas:

“The Polish Justice Minister has signed permission to hand over to the United States of Dmitry Vasiliev, my client who was detained in Warsaw last year, to the United States as part of an investigation into the criminal case in which Alexander Vinnik was also the accused.”

Surtzhin, who represents Vasiliev at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), hopes that his client will be in the US in the near future to face charges that could result in him 25 years in prison.

Vasiliev’s Odyssey takes him to America after Vinnik returns to Russia

Wex’s former head was arrested in Warsaw in December 2024. At the time, Polish police said they were acting on US demands, adding that Russians were waiting for the extradition process to be completed. The statement cited by Reuters has been detailed:

“Dmitry V. is suspected of numerous fraud, remittances and money laundering in connection with operating one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges.”

But it wasn’t the first time in Vasiliev’s prison. Polish law enforcement detained him in 2021 when he was wanted and then sent to Kazakhstan. Central Asian countries had accused him of fraud related to the crypto exchange he was running on.

Earlier that year, Vasiliev was arrested in Italy but was released a few weeks later, with Italian authorities citing the mistake in their extradition request. Then in 2022, he was also arrested in Croatia, local media reports revealed that Zagreb acted on a red warrant issued by Interpol.

The Kazakhstan incident was based on accusations from three crypto investors who claimed that Russians took the dollar in 2018 but never sent out the bitcoin they wanted to buy. It was closed in October 2024 after the court found it too incompetent to work with crypto wallets.

Another chapter in vinnik-wex-btc-e saga

WEX was launched in September 2017 after BTC-E was closed earlier that year. The former was considered a successor to the latter because it took over the customer database. Vasiliev managed a new trading platform until it collapsed in 2018.

His arrests included nearly $500 million vanishing from accounts hosted on WEX, including those belonging to European investors.

BTC-E suspect Alexander Vinnik was arrested in Greece in 2017. He was later handed over to France and sentenced to five years in December 2020.

Vinnik was then handed over to the US in 2022, where he was responsible for up to $9 billion in laundry through the exchange. In May 2024, he pleaded guilty to money laundering charges.

Ultimately, the US traded Vinnik in a prisoner exchange with Mark Vogel, an American school teacher who has been detained in Russian prisons since 2021 and sentenced to 14 years for allegedly carrying medical marijuana in baggage, in a prisoner exchange with Moscow under President Trump.

Earlier this June, Bloomberg Act reported that another suspicious BTC-E operator, Belarus National Aliaksander Klimenka, had asked a US judge to dismiss the case against him, claiming that Vinnik could no longer testify on his behalf since his return to Russia.

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