The government’s going after alleged crypto scammers as market crashes/ Alex Castro. Let’s start with the CFTC — the regulator has filed an...
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| The government’s going after alleged crypto scammers as market crashes/ Alex Castro. |
The commission says MTI pitched potential investors by saying it had a bot that invested a pool of Bitcoin into opportunities individual investors may not have access to. Allegedly, people ended up contributing 29,000 Bitcoin to the fund, hoping to get a return on their investment. MTI collapsed in 2020, but the CFTC says those Bitcoin were at one point worth over $1.7 billion.
What actually happened, according to the CFTC, is that Steynberg and MTI “misappropriated, either directly or indirectly, all of the Bitcoin they accepted from the pool participants.” Basically, the commission says it was a multilevel marketing scheme, or MLM. While the agency says it’s trying to get the money back for the alleged victims (as well as ban Steynberg from future trading and violations), it does warn that it won’t necessarily be able to do that because “the wrongdoers may not have sufficient funds or assets.” The CFTC notes that Steynberg was recently detained in Brazil.
The FBI is trying to make sure something similar happens to longtime fugitive Ruja Ignatova, aka the Cryptoqueen. This week, the bureau put her name on its most-wanted fugitive list for her alleged role in the OneCoin scam, which the FBI believes defrauded victims to the tune of $4 billion. You can read more about OneCoin in our 2019 story about Ignatova’s brother, who was arrested for charges related to the scheme, but the TL;DR is that Ruja Ignatova allegedly helped talk people into investing in a OneCoin cryptocurrency that didn’t actually exist.
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