A Berlin court has handed down a sentence of three years and ten months to a man convicted of operating an unlicensed money transfer system that moved 33 million euros through German banks.
Gerard Grischew, who pleaded guilty to document forgery and running an unregistered banking operation, received the sentence on June 10 at the Berlin Regional Court. His legal team indicated they plan to appeal the term.
According to prosecutors, Grischew used counterfeit identification documents and front individuals to establish more than a dozen corporate accounts at German financial institutions. Between May 2022 and his arrest in October 2025, these accounts were used to channel 33 million euros for clients, authorities alleged.
The conviction comes while Grischew was already serving a suspended sentence for a similar operation dating back to his 2021 arrest.
Testimony during the trial revealed that Grischew’s unlicensed system worked both ways: it accepted international wire transfers from clients and returned the funds in cash, and also took cash deposits before executing covert transfers on behalf of customers, including payments tied to drug transactions in Latin America.
All funds passing through the fraudulently established accounts were converted into cryptocurrency to obscure their origins, a police witness testified.
This was not Grischew’s first encounter with the courts for financial crimes. In February 2022, he received a four-year suspended sentence for running a similar black-market banking operation between 2019 and 2021. That earlier scheme reportedly processed 6.5 million euros stolen from German victims of a cyber-trading fraud orchestrated by an individual identified as Timur Rokhlin.
Rokhlin was subsequently sentenced to four and a half years in prison by the Bamberg Regional Court in August 2025 for his role in the cyber-trading scam. Ukrainian authorities confiscated a Lamborghini and a Rolls Royce from him in Kyiv, transferring the vehicles to German officials to help compensate victims.
Before his 2021 arrest in Germany, Grischew had faced trial in the United Kingdom on allegations of heading an international money laundering operation, but was acquitted.