A 17-year-old British high school student has become one of the youngest people sanctioned by Russia. Alexander Browder, son of the former financier turned anti-corruption campaigner Bill Browder, says he made Russia “uncomfortable” by unveiling a cryptocurrency money laundering network he says was being used by Moscow to evade U.S. sanctions.
Alexander Browder published a report in March alleging that Russia created its own “stablecoin” — a term used for cryptocurrencies tied to real assets such as hard currency — to carry out transactions that would otherwise have been blocked by sanctions imposed by the United States, U.K. or the European Union.
“My work is following the money,” Browder told CBS News, adding that by sanctioning him, “the Kremlin has confirmed to me that following this money trail has made them uncomfortable.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry added Alexander Browder’s name to its list of British nationals banned from entering the country on June 2. It said the younger Browder was being barred for publishing “disinformation.”
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“Russia can add my name to whatever list it wants, it won’t change the facts, and it won’t change my world,” he told CBS News.
According to Browder’s report, the Russian stablecoin, named A7A5, was created in 2025 and was used to process $100 billion in transactions last year alone, mostly carried out on crypto exchanges based in Kyrgyzstan.
Alexander Browder said he was inspired by his family’s history of investigating and exposing Russian corruption. His father, Bill Browder, was sanctioned by Russia in 2005 and has been involved in a decades-long battle with the Kremlin after helping to expose an alleged $230 million tax fraud scheme.
In the 1990s, the elder Browder moved to Russia and managed the Hermitage Fund, which became the largest foreign investment fund in the country.
He said his lawyer and close friend Sergei Magnitsky had been helping him investigate the alleged tax fraud scheme when he was arrested, tortured and killed in a Russian jail in 2009.
“I made a vow to his memory, to his family, to myself that I was going to devote all of my time, all of my energy, and all of my resources to go after the people who killed him, [to] make sure they faced justice,” Bill Browder told CBS News in 2022 interview.
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Seventeen years after Magnitsky’s death, Alexander Browder said the basic methods for uncovering fraud haven’t changed, but the technology and skills needed to do it have.
He said he was inspired by the work of his father and his father’s colleagues, but he realized that his father, like many politicians of his age – is “a dinosaur in this aspect.”
“It takes a young person like me to understand this stuff,” he said.
“Cryptocurrency has become [a] new pathway for the Russians, and it’s not a victimless crime,” the teenager told CBS News. “People have been killed around me and so I always wanted to bring justice. This is one way I could.”
And despite his youth, he clearly recognizes that becoming an antagonist of the Russian state carries risks, even for people who aren’t in Russia.
“I’ve always been surrounded with threats of violence, threats of kidnapping, but I’ve never been intimidated,” he said. “If you live in fear, it will only make it worse. What I want to do is expose this gray area, which is funding so much of this violence towards other people. Millions of people are being killed in Ukraine and elsewhere by the Russians. And so if I can play my part in trying to stop that, then I’ll be happy.”