By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) – The founder of a defunct cryptocurrency business was sentenced on Tuesday to more than eight years in prison for defrauding investors and customers out of millions of dollars by marketing a virtual currency called My Big Coin with lies and half-truths.
Federal prosecutors had urged U.S. District Judge Denise Casper in Boston to impose a 13-year prison term on Randall Crater to send a message to others in the first sentencing of a cryptocurrency company founder for a marketing fraud.
While Casper concluded that that request went too far, she rejected Crater's contention that a 30-month prison term was sufficient to punish him for his false claims, including that My Big Coin was a real cryptocurrency backed by gold.
"Certainly cryptocurrency is a newer enterprise, a newer market, a 21st Century market," Casper said. "But the scheme at its core was age-old, and that was fraud."
Crater, who was sentenced to 100 months in total and ordered to forfeit nearly $7.7 million, is expected to appeal. In court, he apologized but said he never meant to defraud anyone.
"I did not set out to steal money from anyone," he said. "That does not mean I am not remorseful."
A jury in July found Crater, 52, guilty of committing wire fraud and making unlawful monetary transactions in a prosecution that spilled out of a precedent-setting case by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The CFTC's 2018 lawsuit against Crater and his failed company, Nevada-based My Big Coin Inc, led to one of the first court rulings holding that a virtual currency could be considered a commodity within the regulator's jurisdiction.
Prosecutors subsequently secured Crater's indictment in 2019 and accused him of causing investors and customers to lose $7.5 million from 2014 to 2017 with lies about My Big Coin, whose name sounded similar to the popular virtual currency bitcoin.
Prosecutors said those false claims included that My Big Coin was a real virtual currency, was backed by gold and had a partnership with MasterCard. Prosecutors said he used the money to buy cars, jewelry, artwork and antique coins.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General’s Office has frozen UAH 32 million ($871,000) in corporate funds of Mykolayiv Bauxite Refinery, owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, the office said in a message on its website on Jan. 30.
Decentraland’s MANA has surged 152% for the month, while The Sandbox’s SAND is up over 90%.
(Bloomberg) — A London-based Perella Weinberg Partners banker died by suicide in the days after the firm’s UK headquarters were searched as part of a German investigation into insider trading, people familiar with the matter said.Most Read from BloombergSony Slashes PlayStation VR2 Headset Output After Pre-Orders DisappointPutin’s War in Ukraine Pushes Ex-Soviet States Toward New AlliesMicrosoft Studio Behind Halo Faces a Reboot on Years of TurmoilBrexit Is Costing the UK £100 Billion a Year in
(Bloomberg) — South Africa is considering declaring a national state of disaster as record power cuts cripple the economy.Most Read from BloombergSony Slashes PlayStation VR2 Headset Output After Pre-Orders DisappointTrump Sues Journalist Bob Woodward for Releasing Interview RecordingsBrexit Is Costing the UK £100 Billion a Year in Lost OutputWall Street Is Losing Out to Amateur Buyers in the Housing SlumpPutin’s War in Ukraine Pushes Ex-Soviet States Toward New AlliesThe government is looking
A focus of Pope Francis' visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo is a meeting on Wednesday with around 60 victims of the decades of violence in the east of the country who have made the cross-country journey to see him. The pontiff had hoped to travel to the eastern city of Goma but cancelled the stop following a resurgence of fighting in the mineral-rich region, where more than 120 armed groups are fighting for control of land and natural resources. The conflict in Congo goes back decades, making it difficult to isolate a few causes, said Jason Stearns, director of the Congo Research Group.
Apple Inc maintains workplace policies that unlawfully discourage employees from discussing working conditions, a U.S. labor agency has found. The National Labor Relations Board will issue a complaint targeting the policies and claiming Apple executives made comments that stymied worker organizing unless the company settles first, an agency official said on Monday in an email reviewed by Reuters. The official had sent the email to Ashley Gjovik, a former Apple senior engineering manager who filed complaints against the company in 2021.
(Bloomberg) — French labor unions rallied more people to a second day of protests against government plans to raise the retirement age and announced two more days of action, turning up the pressure on President Emmanuel Macron to rethink his signature economic reform.Most Read from BloombergSony Slashes PlayStation VR2 Headset Output After Pre-Orders DisappointPutin’s War in Ukraine Pushes Ex-Soviet States Toward New AlliesMicrosoft Studio Behind Halo Faces a Reboot on Years of TurmoilBrexit Is
Iran and Russia have taken a key step toward linking their banking systems in a move that further boosts their cooperation in the face of Western sanctions, an Iranian official said. At a signing ceremony on Sunday, Mohsen Karami, the deputy central bank governor, said banks in the two countries had connected their messaging networks following agreements reached over the past year, according to the state-run IRNA news agency. Karami said 100 banks in 13 other countries were connected to the network, without naming them.
THE HAGUE (Reuters) -Azerbaijan on Tuesday called on judges at the World Court to order Armenia to help demine areas it previously controlled and stop planting explosive devices which prevent Azeri nationals from returning to their former homes. Azerbaijan asked the court, as part of an ongoing larger case, to issue an emergency ruling to order Armenia to give information about the location of the devices to allow for safe demining and stop putting in new mines. "Azerbaijanis are continuing to suffer serious injuries and die because Armenia refuses to share the information that could save them," Azerbaijan's deputy foreign minister Elnur Mammadov told the court.
OpenAI, the creator of the popular chatbot ChatGTP, has released a software tool to identify text generated by artificial intelligence, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday. ChatGPT is a free program that generates textin response to a prompt, including articles, essays, jokes and even poetry, which has gained wide popularity since its debut in November, while raising concerns about copyright and plagiarism. The AI classifier, a language model trained on the dataset of pairs of human-written and AI-written text on the same topic, aims to distinguish text that is written by AI.
The market’s expectations clash with projections from the central bank. The wording of the policy statement after Fed Open Market Committee gathering could indicate how many hikes really are ahead this year.
Digital assets on the Bitcoin blockchain are a perennial goal, but some of Bitcoin’s biggest backers don’t like the idea.
The Biden administration has stopped approving licenses for U.S. companies to export most items to China's Huawei, according to three people familiar with the matter. Huawei has faced U.S. export restrictions around items for 5G and other technologies for several years, but officials in the U.S. Department of Commerce have granted licenses for some American firms to sell certain goods and technologies to the company.
Indian stocks already face headwinds as investors shift to the much-cheaper Chinese market. The travails of Gautam Adani and his energy and infrastructure conglomerate certainly don’t help.
(Bloomberg) — Hungary’s nationalist government ousted hundreds of senior military leaders in the most far-reaching overhaul of the central European nation’s army since it joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.Most Read from BloombergSony Slashes PlayStation VR2 Headset Output After Pre-Orders DisappointPutin’s War in Ukraine Pushes Ex-Soviet States Toward New AlliesMicrosoft Studio Behind Halo Faces a Reboot on Years of TurmoilBrexit Is Costing the UK £100 Billion a Year in Lost Output8
Rep. Eric Swalwell referred to McCarthy as "weaponizing his ability to commit" political abuse during an appearance on CNN.
Ukraine will receive 120 to 140 Western tanks in a "first wave" of deliveries from a coalition of 12 countries, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Tuesday. Kyiv secured pledges from the West this month to supply main battle tanks to help fend off Russia's full-scale invasion, with Moscow mounting huge efforts to make incremental advances in eastern Ukraine.
Nearly half of the Senate Republican Conference has signed on to a letter to President Biden warning they will not vote for any bill to raise the nation’s debt limit unless it’s connected to spending cuts to address the nation’s $31 trillion debt. The letter, led by conservative Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Ted…
General Motors is developing a lithium deposit mine in Nevada to directly source the material, which is critical for making batteries to power electric vehicles.
Access to free COVID vaccines will continue until the federal supply runs out. But for many, free COVID tests could soon be a thing of the past.
How To Make Huge Profits In A Short Time With CryptoGet detailed training system that shows an absolute beginner (without any skill) how to make huge profits in a short time with crypto.
Crypto + NFT Quick Start CourseThe #1 course for profit in the Crypto & NFT world - You will discover the secrets that 99% of people don’t know yet
