Crypto, Code & Chaos: The Absurd Fable of Alexander Gurevich’s $190M Vanishing Act

by

It was a day like any other at Ben-Gurion Airport: sunlight drowsy behind the glass, a sense of banality thick in the air. Yet for Alexander Gurevich—traveler, wanderer, fugitive with a penchant for digital mischief—this terminal was the vestibule to another life. Not his first, nor (if history is any indication) his last. With the confidence of a bureaucrat after payday, he presented a freshly-minted passport bearing the suspiciously noir name “Alexander Block.” Because when on the run, reinventing oneself is only a matter of paperwork and persuasive eyebrow-arching. 🕶️✈️

The charge? Only a trifle: assisting in the notorious 2022 Nomad hack, extracting $2.89 million from a sum large enough to make even the most seasoned oligarch double-take—$190 million in digital chimeras. Nomad, a bridge in cyberspace, had a vulnerability in its code, left gaping like the mouth of a poet mid-insomnia. Gurevich, disenchanted with the grind of honest work, capitalized. He withdrew millions in tokens and tiptoed away into the cryptographic fog.

But, as in any grand Russian novel, this was no tidy burglary. Our protagonist reached out to Nomad’s CTO in disguise, with all the sincerity of a fox at a henhouse convention. He expressed apologies, returned a morsel of the stolen treasure—the digital equivalent of a single potato offered in the aftermath of a famine—and then demanded a “reward.” A neat half-million dollars for this act of apparent benevolence. “I have returned your Kopecks. Now, where is my parade?”

Crypto heist emoji illustration

The CTO, channeling the frugal spirit of a Talmudic scholar, offered 10%—a number sacred to both tithing and haggling. Dialogue fizzled. Gurevich, unimpressed, evaporated into the ether, communication stopped cold as winter in Novosibirsk.

Names changed, passports blossomed under the spring sun, and by May 1, Mr. Block prepared to slip away to Russia. Yet fate, manifest as Israeli police with a keen eye for suspicious facial hair and sudden paperwork, intervened. The man who would be “Block” was arrested before he could even sample the airline peanuts. On May 2, he appeared in court, wrists adorned in the stiff jewelry of justice—handcuffs (not the NFT kind). 🎭

20 years in a cell—or, as Dostoevsky called it, “character development”

An eight-count indictment like a bleak poem: computer fraud, money laundering, and the rest. Should America claim him, twenty years await—twice the sentence for losing your wallet at the Moscow metro, and substantially less pleasant than the Israeli equivalent.

Though Gurevich made Aliyah in 2017, his heart, like an old Moscow trolleybus, wandered far and wide—sometimes Africa, sometimes the liminal zone between law and narrative. Now, with his extradition pending, Israel’s legal machinery grinds forward, promising a hearing fit for a man whose mistakes have, at last, outpaced his aliases. 🍿

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2025-05-05 19:00