The founder of one of Russia's largest cryptocurrency scams has been in jail for allegedly defrauding US$100 million from its investors. Finiko was established in Kazan in 2019 and pretended to be a legitimate BTC investment company. In December 2020, Finiko released its native digital currency FNK. According to local reports, the founders will take BTC from investors and reward them with FNK tokens. Blockchain intelligence firm Crystal Blockchain identified 111 million USDT, 1.8 million USDC and 888 ETH (worth $2.8 million) which it tied to Finiko’s wallet. And then there is Sergey Mendeleev, the founder of Garantex exchange who believes that the amount the scammers made away with was 10 times higher. According to him, in January this year, the Finiko team withdrew $100 million in BTC in just one week, sending the “entire Moscow crypto market on fire.”