‘A badge of honour!’ British teen targeted by Russia after exposing Kremlin crypto scheme speaks to GB News

A British teen was targeted by Russia after he exposed a cryptocurrency money laundering scheme connected to the Kremlin.

Speaking to GB News, 17-year-old Alexander Browder said Moscow’s sanctions “don’t intimidate me” and he wore them as a “badge of honour”.

Mr Browder, along with four other British nationals, has been banned from Russia over “defamatory speculations and false information”.

In a report published by the Henry Jackson Society think-tank, he uncovered $350billion, which states like Russia, Iran and North Korea had allegedly laundered.

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“The sanctions don't intimidate me… I'm wearing it as a badge of honour,” the teen declared.

“The Kremlin's message to me is that I should stop. But my answer is that the work only continues.

“I will only push further to stop bad actors like Russia, Iran and North Korea from using cryptocurrency to launder their funds,” Mr Browder said.

Explaining the schemes which he had uncovered, the teen explained: “It's a very grey area”.

“The world needs to understand how the dirty money moves.

“Russia's reaction to me shows that some people would rather keep that hidden,” he explained.

“Bad actors are constantly trying to steal from pensioners who invest in cryptocurrency, steal from major cryptocurrency exchanges, and disrupt the normal activities within cryptocurrency.

“Most of this is state-sanctioned."

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Delving into how he began his journey, Mr Browder explained: “I witnessed an extreme event where the North Koreans stole $1.5billion in cryptocurrency from a cryptocurrency exchange in less than five seconds.

“So that 1.5 billion went directly to funding their war campaigns and nuclear abilities. And so that really got me started.

“When researching, what I discovered is that there's no way to view all the major cases, and everything is fragmented.

“So I created this, the largest open-source database of cryptocurrency laundering. And what I discovered is that state-sanctioned actors rely heavily on cryptocurrency to launder their funds.

“North Korea receives a third of the government revenue from cryptocurrency. They carried out 30 per cent of the hacks in my database.

“Iran funnels billions of dollars through cryptocurrency, including two UK-registered cryptocurrency exchanges, which I identified, which were registered here in the UK for over five years and processed billions for the IRGC."

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