Beschekov Aleksei

Beschekov Aleksei

Biography

2025: Detention in India at US request

On March 12, 2025, it became known that Indian law enforcement agencies, at the request of the United States, detained the alleged administrator of the Russian crypto exchange Garantex Alexei Beschekov. He is accused of conspiring to launder money and violating sanctions.

According to the Central Bureau of Investigation of India, Beschekov was detained in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Washington is expected to seek the extradition of the man to the United States. The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that Beschekov was Garantex's chief technical administrator and was responsible for reviewing and approving the transactions. American authorities say the Garantex platform received hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal proceeds and was used to facilitate various crimes, including hacking, distribution of ransomware, terrorism and drug trafficking.

On April 5, 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Garantex. Beschekov is accused of conspiracy to launder money, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. He is also charged with violation of sanctions (up to 20 years in prison) and conspiracy to conduct an unlicensed money transfer business (up to five years in prison). At Washington's request, India's foreign ministry issued a preliminary arrest warrant for the man.

Cybersecurity specialist Brian Krebs, a former journalist for The Washington Post, claims that during his arrest, 46-year-old Beschekov was vacationing on the coast of India with his family. It is known that he has Lithuanian citizenship. According to RBC, Beschekov graduated from the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of Moscow State University in 2002.^[1]

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