The American authorities have frozen the cryptocurrency of a Russian businessman
The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Treasury Department has imposed sanctions against Ilya Gambashidze, founder of the Moscow-based Social Design Agency (SDA), and Nikolai Tupikin, founder of Structura LLC. This is reported on the agency's website.
The US authorities claim that Gambashidze and Tupikin spread false information and manipulated public opinion in Latin American countries. For this activity, they were added to the SDN list and assets that are located in the United States or under the control of American citizens were frozen. Among other things, two cryptocurrency addresses allegedly belonging to Ilya Gambashidze were also sanctioned.
Earlier, Tether, the issuer of the largest stablecoin by capitalization, promised to block all addresses included in the OFAC list in order to "preempt any potential abuse of Tether tokens and strengthen security measures." This means that Gambashidze's wallets will probably also be frozen.
According to Elliptic, the addresses listed in the sanctions order received just over $205,000 in USDT. Elliptic, a company cooperating with the American authorities, has ensured the availability of addresses included in the sanctions lists for checking and tracking all capital movements on them.
The results of the on-chain analysis showed that money to these addresses came mainly from the wallets of the Garantex cryptocurrency exchange, which has been under OFAC sanctions since 2022. The agency accused the exchange of money laundering and servicing financial groups located in Russia.
According to the US Treasury, transactions of almost $6 million in cryptocurrency belonging to the Russian hacker group RaaS Conti, as well as about $2.6 million from the Hydra darknet marketplace, passed through the crypto exchange.
