In the Southern District of New York, the US Attorney, Damiam Williams, recently revealed that Jeremy Spence pleaded guilty to a crypto scam estimated to be $5 million. Spence was able to scam more than 170 investors via his illegal crypto funds; the authority presented all details.
Spence was giving out false promises to crypto traders and investors. But more importantly, he showcased a return of 148% to lure in more victims. It was all a Ponzi scheme style where he used to take money from the new investor and pay to the old investor. Thus he started facing enormous amounts of losses in actual trading and had to lie to the investors.
In a press release, the Department of Justice commented that Spence had used false representations to accumulate more investments. It included Spence’s crypto trading techniques that are super profitable. Still, the fact was the trading techniques were very unprofitable. The DoJ explains with an actual example that on January 28, 2018, he forwarded a false message which claimed that when he traded his investor’s funds in the past few months, he got a profit of over 148%.
The authorities added the incident led to a chain reaction where investors started to increase the flow of funding to Spence. As a result, Spence had seen a considerable amount of net losses in the accounts he used to trade the investors’ funds in approximately one month.
Digital currencies are growing very popular, and the number of global crypto scams has increased since last year. The US Department of Justice, in February 2021, charged Kristijan Krstic, a 45-years old Serbian man, who was involved in fraudulent crypto schemes. In addition, the US authorities have joined hands with the South African Government and are investigating South Africa’s multi-billion-dollar crypto scam, Mirror Trading International.
Spence was very smart, and he requested investors to only transfer in the form of Ethereum and Bitcoin for investment. Spence, 25, plead guilty to commodities fraud. He may be sentenced to a maximum of ten years of imprisonment. The information of the maximum potential sentence was only provided for knowledge-based purposes, and the judge will decide the actual punishment.