My Big Coin founder Randall Crater convicted for $6 million crypto fraud
Randall Crater, founder of My Big Coin Pay Inc., has been convicted by a federal jury for defrauding investors by marketing and selling fraudulent virtual currency.
Randall Crater, founder of My Big Coin Pay Inc., has been convicted by a federal jury for defrauding investors by marketing and selling fraudulent virtual currency.
My Big Coin was a purported cryptocurrency and virtual payment services company headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, which offered virtual payment services through a fraudulent digital currency, “My Big Coins”.
The token were marketed as a fully functioning cryptocurrency backed by $300 million in gold, oil and other valuable assets. Randall Crater also falsely told investors that My Big Coin had a partnership with MasterCard and that the token could readily be exchanged for government-backed paper currency or other virtual currencies.
None of these claims were true and Randall Crater misappropriated over $6 million of investor funds for his own personal gain, including spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on antiques, artwork and jewelry, the CFTC found.
The scheme operated from 2014 to 2017, the CFTC filed commodity fraud charges against Crater and My Big Coin in January 2018, as well as civil charges against CEO John Roche and two of Crater’s associates Mark Gillespie and Michael Kruger.
The jury found Crater to be guilty of four counts of wire fraud, which carries a maximum statutory penalty of up to 20 years in prison for each count, and three counts of money laundering, which carries a maximum statutory penalty of up to 10 years in prison for each count. He is scheduled to be sentenced on October. 27, 2022.
Earlier this month, the CFTC won the largest Bitcoin fraud case to date, worth $29 million. Financial Tree and individual defendants were found to have misappropriated millions of dollars of funds obtained from investors for personal use, made Ponzi payments to existing pool participants with new pool participants’ funds, and made false statements to explain their failure to return funds and deliver promised profits.
Financial Tree was found to have operated as a Ponzi scheme for years, trading only a small portion of the money taken in and misappropriating the rest – concealing that misappropriation through Ponzi payments, false accounts statements, and other material misrepresentations and omissions to victims of the Financial Tree Fraud.
Whistleblowers are eligible to receive between 10 and 30 percent of the monetary sanctions collected paid from the CFTC Customer Protection Fund financed through monetary sanctions paid to the CFTC by violators of the CEA.
