The head of the Department of the Executive Service of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine Maksym Kiselyov reported to the cyber police about the theft of $647,000 in cryptocurrencies. This is reported by "StopCor" with reference to sources in law enforcement agencies.
The case was opened back in May. According to his materials, from June to December 2022, Kiselyov purchased virtual assets worth $700,000. In this way, he allegedly planned to help a family that left for Spain after the start of the war in Ukraine. The family has a mansion there worth €1.5 million.
The official said that he started investing in cryptocurrencies on the advice of a married couple - Oleh Gromov and Vita Yefimchuk.
It was Gromov, according to Kiselyov, who helped him create an account on Binance and then set up the Ledger wallet, where the assets were stored. Later, the device was in the possession of the official's wife Oleksandra Goryaeva.
At the end of April 2023, she noticed that the crypto wallet was empty. The woman contacted Gromov by phone, and he assumed that the system had failed.
However, within a few days, he sent a screenshot showing that more than $647,000 had been withdrawn from Kiselyov's wallet on February 14, 2023. On the same day, Gromov left Ukraine.
According to the investigation, 60,000 USDT ended up in the account of a citizen of Ukraine, Dmytro Jioev, on the Binance exchange. Another 587,000 USDT went to another wallet, from where it was transferred to addresses in several transactions, two of which belong to Russian citizens Kirill Zotov and Oleksandr Mikhailov. Together they received over 284,000 USDT.
Subsequently, assets from the wallets of the latter were converted into bitcoins and transferred to another Russian - Danylo Bronikhin. The latter sent Gromov a total of $56,650 after some time.
The police have launched an investigation into fraud and document forgery. Despite the fact that Gromov, Yukhymchuk and Dzioev are involved in the case, the investigators of the ORD project did not rule out that Maksym Kiselyov himself could have been involved in the withdrawal of funds.
We will remind you that in the summer the Security Service and the Bureau of Economic Security of Ukraine liquidated a network of underground cryptocurrency exchangers that worked with Russian payment systems.
