Seattle District Court found Microsoft ex-tester Volodymyr Kvashuk guilty of organizing a fraudulent scheme using crypto. This was reported on the website of the US Department of Justice.
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From August 2016 to June 2018, the 25-year-old citizen of Ukraine, Kvashuk worked in the team of the Universal Store Team, which is responsible for activities in the field of electronic commerce. In this team, online platform testers could make virtually free purchases using digital discount cards.
On the agency’s website, it is reported that Kvashuk resold cards on the Internet so that later he could buy a house on the lake for $1.6 million and a Tesla car. At first, he stole small amounts from his account. The total cost of the stolen funds was about $12,000. But then he started to use the email accounts of other employees: the amounts were equal to millions of dollars.
To confuse the tracks and make it difficult to track the movement of funds, Kvashuk used bitcoin mixers.
The court documents said that he used the Bitcoin mixing service, trying to hide the source of funds that ultimately came to his bank account. He then filed fake tax returns stating that bitcoins were a gift from relatives.
The ex-Microsoft employee faces twenty years in prison.