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  Bulgaria: Four charged with €94.5 million fraud involving railway signalling systems

  European Public Prosecutor's Office

  January 13, 2025

  (Luxembourg, 13 January 2025) – The European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) in Sofia (Bulgaria) has brought charges of fraud against four suspects, following an investigation into a project to design and build signalling and telecommunication systems on the Bulgarian rail network.  The project, which concerns the railway section between Plovdiv and Burgas, is worth over €94.5 million (BGN 184 999 094, 97) in EU financing.

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  Ex-takeaway worker is ordered to pay back £3.1m after money laundering conviction

  The Crown Prosecution Service

  January 13, 2025

  A former takeaway worker who laundered the proceeds of fraud, which saw her rise from living above a restaurant to residing in a multi-million pound rented house, in an affluent part of North London, has been ordered to pay back more than £3.1 million or face extra time in jail. Jian Wen, 42, was previously convicted at Southwark Crown Court of one charge of Money Laundering, relating to a cryptocurrency wallet containing 150 Bitcoin, for which she was sentenced to six years and eight months imprisonment. A Metropolitan Police investigation resulted in the seizure of Bitcoin wallets, with an initial estimated value of more than £300 million. Prosecutors told the court the sheer scale of the seized Bitcoin, the lack of any legitimate evidence for how it was acquired, all indicated that it was criminal property.

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  Operators of Cryptocurrency Mixers Charged with Money Laundering

  US Department of Justice

  January 10, 2025

  A federal grand jury in the Northern District of Georgia returned an indictment on Jan. 7 charging three Russian nationals for their involvement in operating the cryptocurrency mixing services Blender.io and Sinbad.io. Roman Vitalyevich Ostapenko and Alexander Evgenievich Oleynik were arrested on Dec. 1, 2024, roughly a year after Sinbad.io’s online infrastructure was seized as part of a coordinated law enforcement action among the Netherlands’ Financial Intelligence and Investigative Service, Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation, and the FBI. The third defendant, Anton Vyachlavovich Tarasov, remains at large.