Russian Court Jails Finiko Crypto Scam Exec for Three Years
A Russian court has sent a Finiko executive to prison for three years, after finding her guilty of helping to mastermind the biggest crypto scam in “post-Soviet history.”
Per Izvestia, Liliya Nurieva, the former head of networks at Finiko, was handed a four and a half year term at a court in Vakhitovsky, Kazan on May 17.
However, the court said it would consider the time she had already spent in pre-trial custody as “time served.”
The judge rejected prosecutors’ requests to jail Nurieva for six and a half years.
The media outlet explained that Nurieva had been facing a 10-year jail term before her trial.
But, it revealed, the former executive struck a “pre-trial agreement” with prosecutors.
The executive’s lawyer told media representatives that Nurieva intended to appeal the sentence. She was found guilty of fraud and organized crime-related offences.
Finiko launched in 2018 as a supposed crypto “investment fund.”
The country’s Central Bank thinks that the firm duped citizens out of about $1.1 billion. Much of this money is yet to be recovered.
The project began to unravel in 2021, after which many of the Finiko masterminds fled overseas.
After an extended international manhunt, Interpol arrested co-founder Edvard Sabirov in the UAE in late 2022.
Co-founder Kirill Doronin, the “public face” of the operation, was arrested in mid-2021.
But Nurieva remains the first Finiko executive to have been found guilty and sentenced.
Finiko told investors it operated an “automated profit-generating system” that guaranteed customers profits of “up to 30%” on stakes of $1,000 or above.
The firm also ran a range of borrowing and financing services, all with extremely generous rates.
Finiko gathered funds from its customers using Bitcoin (BTC). It also
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