Bitcoin Bribe Worth $73 Million Lands Russian Investigator 16-Year Prison Sentence

A former Russian investigator received a 16-year prison sentence on Tuesday for taking bribes in Bitcoin, marking the largest bribery case in Russian history. 

Marat Tambiyev accepted roughly $73 million in Bitcoin from organized criminals he was investigating—more than five times the amount of the former highest bribe in Russia, Reuters reported, citing Russian media reports.

Tambiyev moved more than half of the organized crime group’s Bitcoin into his own cryptocurrency wallets, allowing them to keep the other half of the funds instead of seizing all the assets for the state, according to Russian prosecutors. Investigators discovered the wallets’ keys in a file called "Pension" on Tambiyev's laptop. 

Tambiyev has asserted his innocence in court, alleging in court that his actions enabled the state to recover some of the crime group's proceeds. He plans to appeal his conviction, according to Russian state media.

More than a third of the funds that were once held on Tambiyev's computer have been recovered. The locations of the rest of the Bitcoin remains unclear. 

An alleged accomplice of the former investigator received a nine-year prison sentence in connection with the case.

This isn’t the first time criminals have tried to bribe high-ranking officials and law enforcement with Bitcoin in recent years. In 2022, the U.S. Justice Department reported that Chinese intelligence officers paid $61,000 in Bitcoin bribes to a double agent working on behalf of the FBI.

Edited by Andrew Hayward