UK Sanctions Cryptomus, Heleket, and TokenSpot, Alleging They Assisted Russia in Evading Financial Blockade

October 8: The UK announced a new round of sanctions against Russia, with a total of 38 designations, targeting three crypto trading platforms, two payment platforms, one associated individual, and one Moscow bank, on suspicion of assisting Russia in evading financial sanctions. Among them, Cryptomus and Heleket were listed as different names of the same entity Xeltox Enterprises Ltd (also known as Certa Payments Ltd, registered in Canada); TokenSpot CJSC is registered in Kyrgyzstan. The same batch also includes Kyrgyz payment platform Tsunami Payments LLC.

On-chain analytics firm TRM Labs said TokenSpot transferred more than $950 million cumulatively to the already sanctioned trading platforms Grinex, Garantex, and the Kremlin-backed A7 network. In April, TRM assessed that Cryptomus and Heleket had operational ties and said Heleket was likely a parallel service launched by Cryptomus to continue processing funds on a large scale; on October 6, it further assessed that TokenSpot and Grinex share wallet infrastructure and belong to the same operation. TRM's April data also showed that in on-chain transactions between Cryptomus and Garantex, it received more than $204 million and transferred out $101 million.