Cell Signal: Bulgarian Ex-Operator Accused of Routing $290K Forfeited Crypto From Prison 🔐

Rossen Iossifov, a 53-year-old Bulgarian national already serving a 111-month federal sentence, has been charged in the Eastern District of Kentucky with moving roughly $290,000 in cryptocurrency that a court had ordered him to forfeit. The Department of Justice said Iossifov made his first court appearance this week on counts of removing property to prevent seizure, aiding and abetting, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege that in January 2024 he conspired to withdraw and transfer the assets — held in a Kraken account registered to him that had been restrained during the investigation — through several exchanges and mixing services designed to obscure their trail, all in an effort to keep the funds out of the government's hands. The DOJ announcement did not say how the account was accessed or whether the funds have been recovered.

Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department's Criminal Division said defendants who "flout lawfully entered orders" from earlier cases will be charged for that obstruction. The U.S. Secret Service, which investigated the matter, called the alleged transfers a "direct challenge" to the courts and to his victims. If convicted, Iossifov faces up to 25 years in prison on top of his current term.

Iossifov owned and ran RG Coins, a cryptocurrency exchange based in Sofia, Bulgaria, and was convicted in 2021 of racketeering and money-laundering conspiracies tied to the Alexandria Online Auction Fraud network. According to trial evidence, the Romanian ring posted fake listings for cars and other high-value goods on sites such as eBay and Craigslist, collected payments from at least 900 American victims and funneled the proceeds to overseas launderers, with Iossifov converting the crypto to cash at the end of the chain. Trial evidence showed he laundered nearly $5 million in cryptocurrency in under three years, and he was ordered to pay more than $2.6 million in restitution in addition to forfeiting the crypto now at the center of the new case.

The Justice Department's computer crime section, which handled the prosecution of the original case, said it has secured convictions of more than 180 cyber and intellectual-property criminals since 2020 and obtained court orders returning over $350 million to victims. The new indictment comes as authorities intensify scrutiny of crypto infrastructure used to obscure illicit flows; separately, Interpol said on Thursday that a wallet tied to a suspected romance-scam money launderer processed over $122 million in 10 months using cross-chain swaps, as part of a broader operation across 97 countries and territories that led to 5,811 arrests and the interception of $293 million in assets tied to fraud and money laundering. An indictment is an allegation, and Iossifov is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.