Federal prosecutors unsealed criminal charges on Wednesday against two men accused of operating AudiA6, a cryptocurrency laundering service that processed more than $389 million in transactions since 2021.
Ruslan Igorevich Tkachuk, 37, a Ukrainian national, and Alexander Vladimirovich Ledenev, 25, a Russian national, were arrested the same day in Batumi, Georgia. Each is awaiting extradition and faces one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments and one count of sting money laundering, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said in a statement on Thursday.
According to the statement, the criminal complaint alleges that Tkachuk and Ledenev are senior members of the AudiA6 organization and also manage the Dark2Web cybercrime forum, where AudiA6 advertised its services.
A Dark2Web advertisement quoted in the complaint offered to conceal and disguise the source of any customer's cryptocurrency that would otherwise be traceable to criminal sources, for a fee of up to 5% of the amount being laundered.
Through blockchain analysis, law enforcement determined that approximately 10,333 bitcoins had been deposited into AudiA6's cryptocurrency wallets since the service launched in 2021, the statement said.
Of that total, approximately 393.39 BTC arrived directly from known darknet markets, ransomware organizations, cybercrime services and other illicit sources. The remaining funds were deposited indirectly from illicit sources.
The U.S. Attorney's office stated that the operation was conducted as a joint task involving the U.S. Secret Service, Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation, Europol and Eurojust. The international coalition also included law enforcement partners from Australia, Canada, France, Georgia, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Poland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Per the statement, the joint action included searches of three properties, the targeting of servers and domains across the United States, Iceland, Germany and France, the blocking of Telegram accounts used by the network and the freezing of cryptocurrency assets alongside the seizure of digital devices.
The clear web and dark web infrastructure associated with AudiA6 and the Dark2Web forum were also replaced with law enforcement seizure banners.
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