Russian Official’s $258M Crypto Bribery Scandal Leads To BTC Seizure
Russian authorities seized around $10 million in Bitcoin (103 BTC) from Marat Tambiev, a former ICRF employee convicted of cryptocurrency-related bribery in 2023.
The Bitcoin was stored on a Ledger Nano X hardware wallet, which was confiscated as part of court proceedings and will be added to Russia’s state revenue. However, this amount represents only 4% of the total bribe Tambiev received.
In October 2024, Tambiev was sentenced to 16 years in prison for accepting 2,718 BTC—worth nearly $258 million at the time—from a hacker group known as the Infraud Organization. This is considered the largest bribery case in Russian history, according to local news agency RBC.
The investigation revealed that Tambiev’s private keys were…
