PANews reported on January 18 that according to an announcement by the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove sentenced Indian national Anurag Pramod Murarka to 121 months in prison for conspiracy to launder money. Murarka, 30, is an international virtual currency provider operating under two nicknames ("elonmuskwhm" and "la2nyc").
According to recently released court documents, from April 2021 until September 29, 2023, Murarka operated an international money laundering business. Murarka would often advertise his services online as a money laundering service on darknet marketplaces. Clients would then contact him via encrypted messaging in response to these ads and negotiate an exchange rate. Once the exchange rate was determined, Murarka, who was based in India, would instruct his clients to send cryptocurrency to certain cryptocurrency addresses. Murarka would then arrange for the cash to be delivered to his employees in the United States through a complex, pre-arranged Indian hawala operation. Murarka’s network of employees throughout the United States and abroad would collect the cash from Murarka’s hawala connections and then package the cash in a variety of ways, including between book pages and sealing in multiple envelopes, before mailing the cash to the clients.
Murarka collected fees for his services and used a portion of those fees to bribe employees and co-conspirators. Murarka knew that many of his clients were involved in criminal activity, particularly computer hacking and drug trafficking, and therefore knew that his business facilitated criminal activity by helping to conceal the origin of the illegal activity. Murarka and his co-conspirators laundered more than $20 million in total.
