PANews reported on January 10 that according to Cryptonews, Russia has begun selling Bitcoins confiscated in its 2023 investigation into the Infraud hacker group. The move indicates that Moscow hopes to exchange more than 1,000 Bitcoins for legal tender. Russia's official news agency TASS confirmed the progress and said that Moscow will first sell nearly $10 million worth of Bitcoin confiscated from Marat Tambiev, a former Russian Investigative Committee investigator.
Last year, Tambiev was convicted of accepting bribes from a hacker group. Prosecutors found hundreds of bitcoins on his computers and storage devices. The former investigator was convicted of accepting 1,032.1 bitcoins from the group and sentenced to 16 years in prison. However, the bailiffs' efforts to liquidate all 1,032.1 bitcoins have been complicated by legal obstacles. Tambiev appears to have divided the bitcoins into several smaller amounts. This means that the bailiffs must submit a separate court ruling to allow Moscow to access the bitcoins. However, the bailiffs have successfully persuaded the court to allow them to sell the first batch of bitcoins. They said Tambiev stored the bitcoins in a Ledger Nano X hardware encryption wallet. TASS cited sources as saying that prosecutors also want to sell another batch of bitcoins "worth millions of rubles", and they also want to sell "several properties in the Moscow region" and a "Honda motorcycle."
