A Berlin court has handed down a sentence of three years and ten months to a German national for his role in an illicit financial scheme that moved 33 million euros through the global banking system. Gerard Grischew, who admitted to charges of document forgery and running an unregistered banking operation, was convicted on June 10 at the Berlin Regional Court. His legal team announced plans to appeal the sentence.
Prosecutors detailed that Grischew used counterfeit identification documents and front individuals to establish over a dozen shell companies with accounts in German banks. From May 2022 until his arrest in October 2025, these accounts were used to process 33 million euros for various clients, according to court records.
The conviction came while Grischew was still under a suspended prison sentence for a comparable offense, for which he had been arrested in 2021. Authorities noted that his unlicensed payment system operated by receiving international bank transfers from clients and returning the equivalent in cash. Conversely, it accepted cash payments and secretly transferred funds abroad, including for drug-related transactions in Latin America.
During the trial, a police witness testified that all funds funneled through Grischew’s fraudulent accounts were converted into cryptocurrency to obscure the money trail. This method helped hide the flow of illicit cash.
Grischew had previously received a four-year suspended sentence in February 2022 for running a similar black market banking network between 2019 and 2021. That scheme involved 6.5 million euros stolen from German victims of a cyber-trading fraud orchestrated by an Israeli-Ukrainian man named Timur Rokhlin. In August 2025, Rokhlin was sentenced by the Bamberg Regional Court to four and a half years in prison for the same scam. Ukrainian authorities also seized a Lamborghini and a Rolls Royce from Rokhlin in Kyiv, transferring the luxury vehicles to Germany to help compensate defrauded investors.
Before his 2021 arrest in Germany, Grischew had been tried and acquitted in the United Kingdom on allegations of leading an international money laundering operation. His former defense lawyer, Kieran Vaughan KC, prominently features details of that case on a website promoting his legal services.