The Canadian teenager was getting anxious. It was May 2024, and he was in Copenhagen, running out of money after leaving Moscow a week earlier. He’d booked the cheapest room he could find in the Danish capital, but the hostel was still more expensive than he’d expected. The teen, Laken Pavan, opened Telegram to type out a message to his handler in Russia’s Federal Security Service, which runs the country’s spy operations and is known by its acronym FSB. “Are you able to send BTC today?” Pavan wrote to the man, using the shorthand for bitcoin. Pavan knew the man only as “Slon,” or elephant in Russian. The man had been ... (full story)