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FTC Sending More Than $470K to People Duped by My7Network, 'Bitcoin Funding Team' Scams

The FTC is sending PayPal payments totaling more than $470,000 to people who lost money to two pyramid schemes involving cryptocurrencies.

Updated Sep 14, 2021, 10:27 a.m. Published Nov 4, 2020, 6:56 p.m.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said it is sending PayPal payments totaling more than $470,000 to people who lost money to two pyramid schemes involving cryptocurrencies.

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According to the FTC, the defendants promoted Bitcoin Funding Team and My7Network, which falsely promised that participants could earn large sums of money by paying cryptocurrency such as bitcoin (BTC) or litecoin (LTC) to sign up.
However, Bitcoin Funding Team and My7Network were pyramid schemes that depended on the recruitment of new people to make money. Most of the participants in the schemes failed to recoup their initial investments, the FTC said.
As part of the settlement, the FTC will send 7,964 refunds through PayPal beginning on Nov. 5. The average refund is about $59.
The more than $470,000 in payments follows agreements by the scheme's principals who agreed in 2019 to pay more than $500,000 in total under terms of the settlement.

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Kevin Reynolds

Kevin Reynolds was the editor-in-chief at CoinDesk. Prior to joining the company in mid-2020, Reynolds spent 23 years at Bloomberg, where he won two CEO awards for moving the needle for the entire company and established himself as one of the world's leading experts in real-time financial news. In addition to having done almost every job in the newsroom, Reynolds built, scaled and ran products for every asset class, including First Word, a 250-person global news/analysis service for professional clients, as well as Bloomberg's Speed Desk and the training program that all Bloomberg News hires worldwide are required to take. He also turned around several other operations, including the company's flash headlines desk and was instrumental in the turnaround of Bloomberg's BGOV unit. He shares a patent for a content management system he helped design, is a Certified Scrum Master, and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. He owns bitcoin, ether, polygon and solana.