Garantex

Notes

Verified compliance review, 30/07/2026. Assessment: confirmed_fraud. Licence verdict: sanctioned. Confidence: high. Sanctions / enforcement: OFAC designated Garantex on 5 April 2022 under EO 14024 alongside the Hydra takedown; EU sanctions followed in early 2025; US authorities seized the Garantex domains and froze about USD 26 million in March 2025, and DOJ charged administrators Aleksej Besciokov and Aleksandr Mira Serda with money laundering; successor Grinex and associated A7A5 stablecoin network were sanctioned in August 2025. Estonian-registered, Moscow-operated exchange founded 2019, long identified as a laundering channel for ransomware and darknet proceeds. The Estonian FIU records that the company lost the right to provide virtual currency services with authorisation ending 24 February 2022 after systemic AML failures (identity verification failures affecting over 90% of customers, failure to report suspicious transactions); the FIU notice does not publish a licence number, so no licence object is recorded here rather than inventing one. The registry code 14850239 comes from a secondary reference and was not confirmed against the Estonian Commercial Register directly - treat that field as medium confidence. Reporting through late 2025 and 2026 (TRM Labs, ICIJ, Transparency International Russia) indicates the operation continued through successor infrastructure despite the seizure, including large transfers through mixers. Co-defendant Besciokov reportedly died in custody in India on 31 August 2025. All sheet contact addresses (support@, compliance@, info@, legal@garantex.io) sit on seized domains; do not rely on them for legal process.

Licences

No licences found in the registers we check.

Regulator actions

No regulator action recorded.

Official channels

No official channels on record.

Anything not on this list is not an official Garantex channel.

Contact routes