Ukrainian police announced the arrest of four suspects on accusations of running six fake cryptocurrency exchanges. The four men, aged between 20 and 26, were arrested last week in the city of Dnipro.
Police said the four had “special knowledge and skills in the field of programming” and “have created their own CMS-system for managing the content of exchange sites.”
The four created at least six fake cryptocurrency exchange sites on which they stole funds from users. The group kept their reputation intact via online reviews pushing fake positive ratings.
According to the National Police of Ukraine (NPU), the four used forged identificiation documents to create an account, which they would immediately close after a victim transferred money to the account. All the six cryptocurrency exchanges have been closed with only one redirecting visitors to a pornography site. It is yet unclear how much the four individuals collected from unsuspecting victims.
Police seized computers, flash drives, bank cards and mobile phones from the suspects’ addresses, investigators said. The four will be charged under Section 3 of Article 190 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code.
All domains are expired at the time of writing, but some sites have lived long enough to be indexed by the Wayback Machine portal.
“The list of sites is not complete,” a spokesperson for the Ukrainian National Police said in a statement. Investigators believe the group ran more sites. They are now asking users to file complaints if they’ve been duped by fake exchanges in the past.
Last year, Ukrainian Police arrested a group who made over $50 million worth of Bitcoin by running a massive phishing operation. The group rented Google ads that showed at the top of cryptocurrency-related search pages and redirected traffic to clones of popular wallet and exchange portals.
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