The Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Department of Treasury (OFAC) re-sanctions the Garantex Europe OU cryptocurrency exchange, which directly assisted known cybercriminals and ransomware program authors by processing transactions worth over $100 million since 2019, as well as its successor, Grinex registered in Kyrgystan, three executives, and six related companies in Russia and Kyrgyzstani that supported the exchanges’ involvement in malicious cyber activity.
These individuals and entities have been sanctioned: Sergey Mendeleev, co-founder of Garantex; Mira Serda, Alexander Hoseluisovich, co-owner and commercial director of Garantex, Pavel Karavatsky, co-owner and regional director of Garentex LLC A7-AGENT, LLC A7, LLC A1, Exved, Independent Decentralized Finance SmartBank & Ecosystem (the project website states that its founder is banker Alexander Lebedev), OLD Vektor (Kyrgyzstan).
Russian Garentex has been under US sanctions since 2022 and the exchange was on the EU sanction list since February 4, 25. After that the issuer of USDT stable coin, Tether blocked cryptocurrencies on Garantx wallets in amount of 2.5 billion roubles.
In July, the American analytics company TRM labs, specializing in blockchains and cryptos, named Grinex Crypto Exchange registered in Kyrgystan as likely successor to Garantex.
