Russia’s FSB raids Moscow City crypto exchanges, saying they were used to funnel stolen money to Ukraine. Some detainees believed they were working for the FSB.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) detained more than 20 people who worked at crypto exchange offices in the Moscow City business complex, saying the exchanges were illegal and that fraudulent call centers in Ukraine used them to move money stolen from Russians out of the country.

In all, security service and police officers shut down nine channels the FSB described as “coordinated from abroad to move funds out of the country using cryptocurrency.” According to the FSB, these exchanges were used to sell cryptocurrency to Russian citizens — including retirees who had fallen under the influence of scammers — that was then “transferred to the accounts of Ukrainian handlers,” the FSB stated. To staff the exchanges, the security service stated in its press release, “young people lacking sufficient financial literacy and looking for easy money were remotely recruited from Russian regions.”

Authorities also detained “accomplices of Ukrainian call centers” — couriers between the ages of 18 and 25 who, according to the agency, collected money from defrauded citizens and passed it on to the crypto exchanges.

Investigators with the Interior Ministry have opened criminal cases on charges of large-scale fraud, and those detained face up to 10 years in prison.

The FSB published video footage of the raids showing detainees lying on the floor during the search. The independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo said one of the detainees was carrying a bag bearing the logo of the Mashuk Knowledge Center — an educational organization whose construction was approved by Vladimir Putin.

In the video, she and a young man say they consider themselves non-staff employees of the FSB. Another woman says she worked with Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service. A fourth young man says he was contacted by people identifying themselves as FSB and Rosfinmonitoring officers, who told him to move all his money in order to cancel a power of attorney that scammers had drawn up in his name. Later, they told him he would have to “work as a non-staff employee” of the Russian Cash-in-Transit Association (Rosinkas). He says that over the past several days he had been following the demands of “the FSB and Rosfinmonitoring officers” and now realizes they were scammers.

It’s unclear under what circumstances the detainees were questioned.

Security officials have repeatedly raided crypto exchanges in Moscow City, according to Agentstvo. Inspections in September 2025, for instance, continued for several days and were linked to money being funneled to Dubai. Reports of new raids in Moscow City surfaced in late July. According to reports from the pro-Kremlin Russian television channel Ren TV, investigators searched offices of the “Federatsiya Vostok” chain as part of a fraud investigation involving a man identified only as Vladimir R., who the channel said was deceived by people posing as “fake FSB officers” and convinced to transfer them 144 million rubles. The money passed through one of the crypto exchanges.