A man with a prior record of running an underground financial network has been sentenced to three years and ten months in prison for funneling €33 million through fraudulent accounts.
Gerard Grischew, 46, was convicted in Berlin’s Regional Court on June 10 after admitting to charges of document forgery and operating an unlicensed banking system. His legal team announced plans to appeal the verdict, citing the severity of the punishment.
Investigators revealed that Grischew used counterfeit identification and front individuals to incorporate over a dozen shell companies, each holding accounts with German banks. From May 2022 until his arrest in October 2025, he allegedly utilized these accounts to shift €33 million for clients, authorities said.
Notably, at the time of his latest arrest, Grischew was still under a suspended prison term for a parallel operation. In February 2022, he had received a four-year suspended sentence for running a similar black-market banking scheme between 2019 and 2021. That earlier operation handled approximately €6.5 million stolen from German victims in a cyber-trading fraud conducted by an Israeli-Ukrainian named Timur Rokhlin.
During the Berlin trial, a police witness testified that Grischew’s unregistered payment system operated a two-way cash exchange: it accepted international bank transfers and returned cash to clients, and also took cash from clients before secretly wiring funds abroad, including for narcotics purchases in Latin America. All proceeds from the fraudulent accounts were converted into cryptocurrency to obscure the financial trail, the witness stated.
Rokhlin, the mastermind behind the cyber-trading scheme, was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison by a court in Bamberg in August 2025. Ukrainian authorities confiscated a Lamborghini and a Rolls-Royce from him in Kyiv, transferring the luxury vehicles to German officials to help compensate the fraud victims.
Before his 2021 arrest, Grischew had been tried and acquitted in the United Kingdom on allegations of leading a major international money laundering network. His former defense lawyer, Kieran Vaughan KC, details that case on a website promoting his legal practice.