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By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) - The founder of a cryptocurrency financial services firm pleaded guilty on Friday to U.S. charges that he participated in a wide-ranging scheme to manipulate the market for digital tokens on behalf of client companies.
Aleksei Andriunin, the founder and CEO of cryptocurrency "market maker" Gotbit, and his company entered guilty pleas in federal court in Boston to charges that they conspired to commit market manipulation and committed wire fraud.
The pleas by the Russian national and his company came less than a month after Andriunin, 26, was extradited from Portugal, where he had been residing at the time of his arrest in October as part of a probe into the crypto sector.
They were among 15 people and three firms charged following a novel investigation dubbed "Operation Token Mirrors," in which the FBI for the first time directed the creation of its own digital token to help catch fraudsters in the crypto market.
According to their plea deals, prosecutors have agreed to recommend that Andriunin receive up to two years in prison when he is sentenced on June 16, prosecutors said. Gotbit agreed to forfeit about $23 million in cryptocurrency.
Andriunin's lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
Prosecutors said that from 2018 to 2024, Gotbit engaged in "wash trading," a form of sham trading, and market manipulation on behalf of several cryptocurrency clients to help artificially inflate trading volume for their tokens.
The indictment cited a 2019 interview published online in which Andriunin described developing a code to wash trade cryptocurrencies to artificially inflate trading volume so they could get listed and trade on larger cryptocurrency exchanges.
Prosecutors said Gotbit made wash trades worth millions of dollars and received tens of millions of dollars in proceeds for its services for cryptocurrencies including Saitama and Robo Inu. Individuals associated with those cryptocurrencies have also been charged.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
