World | Thu Mar 3, 2016 1:41pm EST

New Jersey pastor indicted for bribery in case tied to JPMorgan hacking

NEW YORK | BY NATE RAYMOND

A New Jersey pastor was indicted on Thursday for an alleged bribery scheme involving a bitcoin exchange owned by an Israeli man linked to cyber attacks on JPMorgan Chase & Co and other companies.

Trevon Gross, the pastor and former chairman of the Helping Other People Excel Federal Credit Union of Jackson, New Jersey, was charged with receiving payments to let operators of an illegal bitcoin exchange gain control of the credit union.

Gross, 46, was accused of accepting $150,000 in bribes from individuals including Anthony Murgio, who operated an unlicensed bitcoin exchange called Coin.mx, and Yuri Lebedev, who supervised computer programing functions for the exchange.

Prosecutors have said their goal was to operate the credit union as a captive bank and evade potential scrutiny of Coin.mx, which was owned by Gery Shalon, an Israeli accused of orchestrating a massive hacking scheme.

Prosecutors have said Shalon, another Israeli, Ziv Orenstein, and an American, Joshua Samuel Aaron, ran a criminal enterprise that hacked into a dozen companies' networks, stealing the personal information of more than 100 million people.

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