Philly feds charge two with running a cryptocurrency money laundering scheme that tried to conceal nearly $400 million
A group that called itself "AudiA6" offered to take cryptocurrency from online criminals and "mix" it to try and hide the origins from authorities, prosecutors said.
Two men living in the Republic of Georgia have been charged by federal authorities in Philadelphia with running an international money laundering scheme that tried to use cryptocurrency exchanges to mask the source of nearly $400 million, prosecutors said Thursday — including at least $20 million that came directly from accounts associated with illicit actors on the dark web.
Igorevich Tkachuk, 37, of Ukraine, and Alexander Vladimirovich Ledenev, 25, of Russia, were arrested Wednesday in Georgia, where both live in the coastal city of Batumi, according to U.S. Attorney David Metcalf. Prosecutors will seek to extradite them to Philadelphia to face money laundering charges.
Metcalf said the two men were part of an organization that dubbed itself “AudiA6.” The group had two primary functions, prosecutors said: managing a cybercrime forum known as Dark2Web, where users could strike deals to commit crimes against targets for money, and running a cryptocurrency-based money laundering service, through which users could have their virtual currency “mixed” into different streams that would make the origins harder for authorities to trace.
Over the last five years, prosecutors said in a criminal complaint, AudiA6 received $389 million from customers to launder, which the group would “mix” in exchange for a commission fee.
About $20 million of those deposits came from accounts prosecutors said were known for committing illicit activity, including groups that perpetuated ransomware attacks or people who were known to have received stolen funds online. Millions more appeared tied to similarly suspicious groups through indirect transactions, they said.
Over the course of the scheme, prosecutors said, AudiA6 received at least $10 million in profit. The group would often charge higher commission fees for smaller transactions.
According to the complaint, federal authorities conducted six undercover transactions with AudiA6 between December 2022 and May 2026. In each, the document said, agents said in messages — typically in Russian — that they wanted to exchange “dirty” digital currency, such as Bitcoin, and AudiA6 took the funds, “mixed” them, and returned the washed proceeds, minus a commission.
In one case this April, an agent in Philadelphia sent a message to the AudiA6 exchange saying: “is [Bitcoin] from scam OK? Stolen bitcoin...”
According to the complaint, the person running the exchange replied: “don’t care.”
AudiA6 then mixed about $5,000, the complaint said, keeping a fee of about $300.
A few weeks later, the document said, an agent in Philadelphia reached out to the exchange again and asked about laundering proceeds from selling cocaine online.
“Is it ok or are the risks too high?” the agent asked, according to the complaint.
“Everything like that needs to go through a mixer,” the operator wrote back, before laundering about $5,100 worth of bitcoin and keeping $400 as a fee.
Despite AudiA6’s promises to customers that the mixed transactions would make funds untraceable, investigators said, the group “was not actually sending and receiving from distinct, unconnected sources.”
“Instead,” they said, “transactions could be directly traced through exchange records.”
Neither Tkachuk nor Ledenev had attorneys listed in court records Thursday.
Each could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted, prosecutors said.
