Russian national Denis Dubnikov, 29, was deported from the Netherlands to the United States this week to face allegations of laundering more than $400,000 in Ryuk earnings.
According to the Justice Department, Denis Dubnikov who was recently deported from the Netherlands to Portland, Oregon, entered a not guilty plea to charges of allegedly laundering bitcoin obtained through ransomware attacks both domestically and internationally.
Russian national Denis Dubnikov, 29, was charged on Wednesday in federal court for the District of Oregon. In order to hide the source of the money, the prosecution said that Mr. Dubnikov and his accomplices laundered bitcoin taken from Ryuk ransomware attack victims via bank transactions using both cryptographic and fiat currencies.
According to court records, Mr. Dubnikov was freed from detention after his plea with a number of restrictions, including the monitoring of his online behavior.
According to a court indictment unveiled on Wednesday, at least twelve additional people are charged in the case. In the indictment, their identities were suppressed, and the accusers of Mr. Dubnikov were not named by the prosecution.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Mr. Dubnikov, a businessman from Moscow, was seized last November while on vacation in Mexico.
According to his attorney Arkady Bukh, he was banned from Mexico and placed on a plane to Amsterdam where Dutch authorities detained him on November 2 on a U.S. accusation of conspiring to conduct money laundering.
His attorney said at the time that he expected to enter a not guilty plea to a charge of conspiring to conduct money laundering in the US.
Asserting that individuals participating in the plot laundered at least $70 million in ransom money, the DOJ accused Denis Dubnikov of collecting and laundering more than $400,000 in Ryuk revenues in 2019.
Ryuk is a form of ransomware discovered in 2018 that encrypts data and tries to wipe any system backups on a machine or network.
According to court filings, the Ryuk actors instructed their victims to pay the ransom in bitcoin and gave them a wallet address to do so.
