An indictment unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia leveled charges against Aleksej Besciokov, 46, a Lithuanian national and Russian resident, and Aleksandr Mira Serda (also known as Aleksandr Ntifo-Siaw), 40, a Russian national and United Arab Emirates resident, according to Justice officials.

According to the indictment, Garantex has processed at least $96 billion in cryptocurrency transactions since April 2019.

In the release, Justice officials said Mira Serda and Besciokov are charged with money laundering conspiracy, and Besciokov is charged with conspiracy to violate sanctions and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business.

Garantex was run by Mira Serda and Besciokov from 2019 to 2015, according to Justice officials. Authorities said Besciokov was Garantex’s main technical administrator and responsible for maintaining critical Garantex infrastructure, as well as reviewing and approving transactions. Officials say Mira Serda was Garantex’s co-founder and chief commercial officer.

U.S. officials say the crypto exchange Garantex received hundreds of millions in criminal funding and was used to “facilitate various crimes, including hacking, ransomware, terrorism, and drug trafficking, often with substantial impact to U.S. victims.”

Besciokov and Mira Serda knew that the exchange was facilitating crimes, Justice officials said, adding that Garantex took steps to conceal the facilitation of illegal activities, such as money laundering, on its platform.

According to Friday’s release from the Justice Department, in April 2022 the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Garantex for its role in facilitating money laundering of funds from ransomware actors and so-called darknet markets.

According to court documents cited in Friday’s release, “despite the widespread publicity of the sanctions and Garantex administrator’s personal knowledge of them, Besciokov and his co-conspirators violated those sanctions by continuing to transact with U.S.-based entities.

“Further, Besciokov and his co-conspirators redesigned Garantex’s operations to evade and violate U.S. sanctions and induce U.S. businesses to unwittingly transact with Garantex in violation of the sanctions,” Justice officials said.

As an example of attempts at evasion, Justice officials said Garantex allegedly moved its operational cryptocurrency wallets to different virtual currency addresses on a daily basis “in order to make it difficult for U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchanges to identify and block transactions with Garantex accounts.”

Additionally and despite doing a notable amount of business in the United States and operating as a money transmitting business, Garantex failed to register with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network as required, Justice officials said.

The U.S. Justice Department said that, on March 6, U.S. law enforcement executed a seizure order authorized by a judge in the Eastern District of Virginia against three website domain names used to support Garantex’s operations: Garantex.org, Garantex.io, and Garantex.academy.

According to officials, the seizure will prevent the sites from being used for money laundering and any other crimes. Individuals who go to those sites now see a message indicating that the site has been seized by law enforcement.

Additionally, officials said Friday that German and Finnish law enforcement also seized servers hosting Garantex’s operations. U.S. law authorities, according to the Justice Department, have separately obtained earlier copies of Garantex’s servers, including customer and accounting databases. More than $26 million in funds used to facilitate Garantex’s money laundering activities have been frozen, U.S. officials said.

If convicted, Besciokov and Mira Serda face decades behind bars.