In Moscow, the Khamovnichesky Court sentenced Pavel Vrublevsky, the founder of the ChronoPay payment system, to 10 years in a penal colony. This was reported by Interfax. He was convicted of fraud (Part 4 of Article 159 of the Russian Criminal Code), theft (Part 4 of Article 158 of the Russian Criminal Code), and money laundering (Part 4 of Article 174.1 of the Russian Criminal Code).
In addition to imprisonment, Vrublevsky was fined 1.5 million rubles. The court also upheld the claims of ten victims, awarding them compensations ranging from 3.2 to 35.5 thousand rubles each.
In the same case, ChronoPay employee Alexey Belyaev, programmer Maxim Vedyashkin, and the director of the company "Vangood" Nadezhda Akimova were also charged. They were sentenced to prison terms ranging from four to eight years. All the defendants did not admit their guilt.
Pavel Vrublevsky was detained in 2022. The investigation claims that from December 2019 to April 2020, he, along with other accomplices, stole 437.5 thousand rubles from 29 Sberbank clients.
Earlier, in 2013, Vrublevsky had already been sentenced to 2.5 years in a penal colony for organizing DDoS attacks on the competing payment system Assist. According to the investigation, he intended to disrupt the agreement between Aeroflot and Assist LLC in order to promote ChronoPay as the airline's key partner.