Pavel Lerner, a senior leader for cryptocurrency company Exmo Finance, was kidnapped on Dec. 26 as he left work in Kiev, Ukraine. Russian and Ukrainian media (link in Russian) were the first to report the kidnapping, saying a group of men wearing balaclavas dragged him into a black Mercedes-Benz.
Foreign press were initially unable to verify those particular details, but over the past day the BBC has partly confirmed it: Local police said “a man had been kidnapped on the day in question, but would not confirm his identity.” The police spokesperson told the BBC that more information would be made public later on as the matter was currently under investigation.
Lerner, a globally prominent Russian blockchain expert, describes himself on his LinkedIn page as the CEO of Exmo Finance, while Exmo described him as an analytics manager to the press. Exmo Finance is registered with Companies House in the UK, with main operations in Ukraine. About 90,000 active users trade cryptocurrencies on its platform.
Following the news, Exmo’s website suffered a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Thursday, where trading was affected temporarily.
Exmo spokesman Anatoliy Larin told the BBC that Exmo is “doing everything possible to speed up the search” for Lerner, the exchange is “working as usual,” and that “all users’ funds are absolutely safe” because Lerner “doesn’t assume access either to storages or any personal data of users.”
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