Accounts of a cryptocurrency exchange that helped Russians arrested

Billium, a cryptocurrency exchange founded by citizens of the terrorist state of Russia and Turkey, has announced that it is suspending its operations due to the alleged arrest of Russian citizen Ilya Angelov. On the exchange’s social media pages, an unknown account that was mistaken for the Russian’s wife promised to return funds to crypto investors. The owners of digital assets were also assured that they would hold a video conference to explain what was really happening.

Ilya Angelov has not been living in Russia for a long time, but he has been actively involving citizens of the occupying state in his projects. At thematic forums, his crypto exchange is mentioned as follows: «Another scam project from a legendary fraudster. Fake reviews from „new crypto enthusiasts“, regular „technical failures“, no foreign social networks — only VK and Telegram, and most importantly, taking money from naive citizens. Ilya Angelov never changes. I really hope that the efforts of this fraudster will not pay off.»

As expected, the Russian media did not hesitate to invite Angelov as an «expert» on circumventing the EU’s cryptocurrency sanctions imposed on the occupying country due to its full-scale military aggression against Ukraine. The crypto trader recommended that Russians trade tokenized shares on cryptocurrency exchanges and not be afraid of asset freezes, «since tokenized shares are centralized and stored on the Ethereum blockchain.»

As a reminder, in January, Interpol arrested Anatoly Legkodymov, another Russian, the founder of the Bitzlato cryptocurrency exchange. According to the US Deputy Attorney General, the Bitzlato exchange was a «critical financial resource» for the black market on the darknet, the Russian Hydra marketplace. Overall, since 2021, Hydra has accounted for 80% of the global darknet market revenue. At the same time, it became known that the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance was a counterparty of Bitzlato. For Russians, Binance laundered about $ 346 million in BTC.