Senior police officers in Russia sentenced for stealing crypto exchange Garantex money

High-ranking Russian law enforcement officers have received lengthy sentences for embezzling large amounts of money from clients of the notorious cryptocurrency exchange Garantex.

The convicted officials, former employees of the Moscow police, had been charged with a number of serious crimes that resulted in the loss of millions of rubles’ worth of customer funds.

Russian policemen get decade-long prison terms for Garantex theft

A court in Russia’s capital has sentenced three police officers for stealing client assets from accounts at the now defunct coin trading platform Garantex.

The representatives of the Russian security forces have received prison terms ranging between 12 and 14 years, local news outlets reported on Tuesday.

In a statement quoted by the Interfax news agency, the Butyrsky District Court of Moscow said it had completed the consideration of the case against them.

The defendants are Antonina Shakina, a senior investigator with the Investigative Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), Renat Bakhtiev and Leonid Golubev.

The latter two are operatives from the Special Technical Measures Bureau of the ministry’s Main Directorate, both senior detectives, too, the Kommersant daily detailed in an article.

All were found guilty of accepting bribes, producing forged documents and abuse of office, while Shakina and Bakhtiev were also convicted of large-scale fraud.

The main charge was related to the embezzlement of a total of more than 30 million rubles (over $350,000) from Garantex customers.

They were sentenced on August 24, when Bakhtiev received 14 years in prison, and his accomplices got 12 years receptively. Each was also fined 6.5 million rubles.

The Butyrsky Court upheld the claims of three victims, ordering the defendants to pay jointly over 31 million rubles in compensation for the inflicted material damages.

Crime scheme organizers relied on fake complaints and court orders

The criminal investigation against the law enforcement officials was initiated in the spring of 2023, the Russian business newspaper recalled in its report.

The case was opened after a complaint from a St. Petersburg resident, Alexander Sazonov, who reported an attempt to steal 24.8 million rubles from his deposit at Garantex.

The police probe established that the three officers from Moscow were involved in the attempted theft of Mr. Sazonov’s assets.

It also found they were linked to the withdrawal of 6.2 million rubles from the accounts of two other Garantex clients, Mikhail Korniychuk and Agakerim Gamzabekov.

The perpetrators used fake complaints filed against the victims by two other accomplices, Denis Potapkin and Liliya Eleshova, to get hold of the funds.

They also employed a fabricated court ruling to freeze the assets and secure the transfer of the money, including cryptocurrency, to accounts controlled by their friends.

The scheme was implemented in 2022 and all participants in it were detained in October the following year. Shakina, Bakhtiev, Golubev have been also stripped of their ranks.

Their lawyers are yet to comment on the court’s verdict, but given the length of the prison sentences, the defense team is likely to appeal against it.

Garantex was a major Russian crypto exchange, headquartered and operating out of the Moscow City business center, although originally registered as Garantex Europe in the EU member-state of Estonia.

The company was providing crypto trading and cross-border money transfer services before it was hit with international sanctions imposed over Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine.

It was allegedly used by the Russian government, sanctioned persons and entities as well as criminal and terrorist organizations, hacking syndicates and darknet markets.

In March 2025, Tether froze $27 million worth of USDT in wallets on the platform, and its website was seized in a U.S.-led operation, as reported by Cryptopolitan.

In August of last year, the United States offered $6 million in bounties for some of the executives who ran the exchange, after sanctioning one of its founders, Sergey Mendeleev.

Grinex, a crypto exchange registered in Kyrgyzstan which is believed to have succeeded Garantex, was also sanctioned later by Western governments.

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