SINGAPORE: Three individuals, including two chief executives, were arrested and extradited from Singapore to appear in court in Oakland, California, over cryptocurrency fraud charges.
The US Department of State identified the three individuals as Russian national Gleb Gora, 24, the chief executive of Vortex, and Indian nationals Manu Singh, 34, and Vasu Sharma, 26.
Manu was a chief executive officer of Contrarian, while Vasu was a business development associate at the same firm.
All three were arrested in Singapore on Oct 2, 2025, at the request of the US government. They made their initial appearance before a US Magistrate Judge on March 30 in Oakland following their extradition from Singapore.
The three foreign nationals are in federal custody.
The US Department of State said in a statement: “Valuable assistance was provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Law Enforcement Attache’s Office in Singapore and the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs, working with the Singapore Police Force and Attorney-General’s Chambers, for securing the arrests and extraditions of Gora, Singh, and Sharma to the United States.”
The three individuals were among 10 executives and employees of four cryptocurrency financial services firms charged in the US over market manipulation allegations.
The accused had allegedly orchestrated fraud schemes to artificially inflate the trading volume and price of cryptocurrencies.
In a statement on March 30, the US Department of State said employees from the four firms – Gotbit, Vortex, Antier, and Contrarian – were charged in three separate indictments.
“The indictments allege that the defendants not only conspired to inflate the trading volume and price of cryptocurrencies but also profited through the sale of the cryptocurrencies at inflated prices to unwitting investors,” said the US Department of State.
“These so-called pump-and-dump schemes caused losses to investors in the United States and elsewhere.”
The statement said two defendants have pleaded guilty and were sentenced by US District Court Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín.
More than US$1 million (S$1.28m) in cryptocurrency has been seized to date.
The indictments and arrests were the result of an undercover operation by the FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) targeting illicit “wash trading” in the cryptocurrency industry.
As part of the undercover operation, the FBI created several cryptocurrency tokens, said the US Department of State.
The defendants acted as illicit market makers by “wash trading” the cryptocurrency to artificially inflate the trading volume and price.
Wash trading occurs when a single trader, or a number of traders, working in coordination, act as both the buyer and the seller in the same transaction or a series of transactions.
“This fraudulent trading tactic creates the appearance that these cryptocurrencies have more active, organic trading than really exists, thereby inducing investors to purchase the cryptocurrencies at artificially inflated prices,” said the US Department of State, which added that the schemes followed a similar pattern.
On March 25, 2025, a federal grand jury in San Francisco, California charged Taiwanese national Antoine Tsao, business development manager for Gotbit; Russian national Ian Sofronov, sales manager for Gotbit; and Serbian national Nemanja Popov, account manager for Gotbit, on charges of wire fraud conspiracy and wire fraud for a scheme to artificially inflate the price of a cryptocurrency token.
Tsao was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on March 30, 2025.
On June 2, 2025, Tsao pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and was sentenced by US District Court Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín in Oakland, California.
Nemanja Popov was arrested at San Francisco International Airport, and was sentenced on Feb 10 by US District Court Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín.
On Aug 28, 2025, a federal grand jury in Oakland indicted Russian national Sergei Ryzhkov, chief financial officer of Vortex; Michael Vogel, business development manager for Vortex; and Gora, on charges of wire fraud conspiracy and wire fraud for a scheme to artificially inflate the price of a cryptocurrency token while planning to liquidate their holdings once trading reached a high price.
On Sept 4, 2025, a federal grand jury in Oakland indicted Indian nationals Manu and Kushagra Srivastava, who were both chief financial officers of Contrarian; Vasu, business development associate at Contrarian; and Sabby Singh, a business development manager at a Contrarian partner firm Antier Solutions.
The defendants were charged with wire fraud and wire fraud conspiracy for a scheme to pump up the price of a cryptocurrency token while at the same time planning to dump their holdings of the token when it reached a high trading price.
If convicted, the defendants face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of US$250,000 for each violation. - The Straits Times/ANN
