UK citizens will pay $ 571 million for cryptocurrency fraud. The corresponding decision was made this week by the New York District Court, TASS reports.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) initiated the lawsuit. According to the American regulator, a resident of Manchester, Benjamin Reynolds, launched a fraudulent scheme, with its help he was able to lure a total of 22,190.5 bitcoins from his victims.
As a result, the judge decided to oblige the offender to pay compensation to the victims of $ 143 million and a fine of $ 429 million.
The CFTC found out that in 2017, the defendant involved more than a thousand people from around the world in a fraudulent scheme. 169 of them turned out to be US citizens.
Reynolds, through social networks, offered people to make money on crypto trading. He said that he has a whole team of investors who are ready to manage digital assets in order to make a profit.
The victims, suspecting nothing, sent the Briton bitcoins, which he simply appropriated and did not perform any trading operations with the coins.
Note that the scale of crypto scams is growing all over the world. Russia and Ukraine in this regard are no exception. Citizens of such countries periodically become victims of scammers offering to make money on investments in digital currencies.
