It’s been decided that Vlad Nistor, founder and CEO of Rumanian crypto exchange Coinflux, will be extradited to the United States after being arrested last month for alleged fraud and money laundering crimes. Nistor was arrested in his home city, Cluj, and his offices were later raided by the local authorities. According to American authorities that were close to the matter, Coinflux was largely involved in money laundering crimes, where participants would commit fraud within the United States to obtain large amounts of Bitcoin (BTC) and then sell it off through Coinflux.
According to Nistor’s defense attorney, Anatol Panzaru, the Court of Appeal was not following the conditions established by the cooperation agreement between Romania and the United States. Furthermore, the attorney also commented on how it was impossible to determine whether or not the transactions made through Coinflux were part of a larger fraud scheme, or where the cryptocurrency even came from given that Coinflux only managed the exchange of crypto and fiat as a service and did not have any direct relationship with its clients.
According to Panzaru, Nistor should not be extradited at all given that there’s no legislation that supports such decision in favor of the American government, and that they do not meet the requirements needed for the process. As for the crimes committed, Panzaru says those were committed in US soil by a group of scammers that Mr. Nistor had no knowledge of or the illegal activities they were carrying out in the US or through Coinflux.
Nistor is not the first CEO in the crypto industry to be extradited for alleged crimes involved fraud or money laundering. A similar situation occurred to Alexander Vinnik, founder of BTC-e cryptocurrency exchange, where the CEO was handed over to France authorities for money laundering.
As of right now, the Supreme Court needs to confirm the verdict from the Court of Appeal to complete the extradition process.
