Lithuanian fugitive hid in plain sight on Kerala beach while wanted for $96B crypto laundering

Aleksej Besciokov arrived at Salim Shah's rented house in Varkala in 2016 with a simple introduction: he was a computer engineer who needed a place to escape Russia's winters. For eight years, he returned faithfully each season, always with his wife Yulia and their son Feliks, sometimes bringing Russian friends. He paid his rent—eventually Rs 4.5 lakh annually—kept to himself, worked late into the night on his laptop, and moved around town on a secondhand scooter. Nobody in the beach town of 3 kilometers of red laterite cliffs and Arabian Sea views seemed to notice or care much about the quiet, reserved man who rarely ate out and bought mostly bananas and canned tuna from the local grocery shop. On March 11, 2025, the police turned up at his door.

What Salim and the neighbors did not know was that Besciokov was Garantex's primary technical administrator—the man responsible for obtaining and maintaining the infrastructure of a Russian cryptocurrency exchange that had become a pipeline for criminal money. Between March 2021 and December 2023, Garantex processed at least $1.2 million from three darknet markets specializing in drug sales and child sexual abuse material. Since 2019, Besciokov and Garantex's co-founder Aleksandr Mira Serda had allegedly processed at least $96 billion in cryptocurrency transactions. The proceeds—hundreds of millions of dollars—flowed from ransomware attacks, hacking operations, terrorism financing, and drug trafficking. In April 2022, the US Department of the Treasury had already sanctioned Garantex for facilitating money laundering from ransomware actors and darknet markets. On March 7, 2025, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Besciokov, and within days, he was arrested.

The arrest itself was almost mundane. Civil police officer Jojin Raj spotted Besciokov on the balcony of the house on the evening of March 11. When Raj knocked on the door, Besciokov opened it fully dressed with his bags already packed. He handed over his passport, the details matched, and then he attempted to bribe the officer with a handful of Rs 500 notes. Within hours, Besciokov's family—Yulia, Feliks, and the family of his friend Kirill—had already left for Russia early that morning. Police seized two laptops, two mobile phones, and documents from the house. Besciokov was presented before Delhi's Patiala House Court and would later face extradition to Virginia's Eastern District Court.

Salim, the landlord, was bewildered. He had known Besciokov for nearly a decade. The man had opened a bank account in India, obtained a valid five-year tourist e-visa issued on February 2, 2024, and filed all the mandatory registration forms with the Foreigners Regional Registration Officer. "If the Indian authorities knew he was a criminal, wouldn't they have caught him at the airport?" Salim asked. The answer, according to Thiruvananthapuram Rural SP K S Sudarsan, was that Besciokov had been careful. "He was probably careful not to indulge in any illegal activities during his stay in India," the officer said. The US agencies had tracked him by monitoring the social media use of his wife. His electronic gadgets were handed over to the CBI. Nothing suspicious was found in his local bank account.

What Besciokov actually did during his months in Varkala remains unclear. Police are still investigating his financial transactions and potential links to local residents, but no suspects have been identified. Varkala DySP Gopakumar, one of the officers who took him into custody, said Besciokov remained calm throughout his arrest. He told police he had been planning to escape to Goa and had visited other Indian cities like Chennai and Mumbai. The reason he stayed in Varkala, Gopakumar suggested, was that Besciokov was worried about getting caught at the airport.

For eight years, Besciokov had lived in plain sight. Salim described him as tall and lean, appearing younger than his 46 years, usually in shorts and round-neck T-shirts. Neighbor Hashim, a taxi driver, noticed the lights on late into the night but never saw Besciokov smile or exchange pleasantries. Athira at the grocery shop remembered that Besciokov, his wife, and son all had similar closely cropped haircuts, dyed at different times in blonde, pink, or purple. He never bought furniture beyond what was already in the house. When he complained about the heat, Salim suggested an air conditioner. Besciokov never bought one and never mentioned the heat again. He was, by all accounts, a man determined to leave no trace, to be forgotten as soon as he was seen. Now, with his indictment unsealed and his extradition pending, the quiet computer engineer from Russia has become the face of a $96 billion money laundering operation that moved the proceeds of ransomware, drug trafficking, and child exploitation across digital borders while he sat in a rented house in Kerala, working on his laptop until dawn.