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UK Man Ordered to Pay More Than $571M for Fraudulent Bitcoin Trading Scheme: CFTC
The man solicited at least 22,190.542 bitcoin, valued at about $143 million at the time, from more than 1,000 customers worldwide.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York entered a default judgment against a U.K. man for operating a fraudulent scheme to solicit bitcoin from members of the public and misappropriating that bitcoin, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said in a release.
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- According to the court's March 2 order, Benjamin Reynolds, purportedly of Manchester, England, was ordered to pay nearly $143 million in restitution to defrauded customers and a civil monetary penalty of $429 million, the CFTC said.
- Reynolds has also been barred from engaging in conduct that violates the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations, registering with the CFTC and trading in any CFTC-regulated markets.
- Between May 2017 and October 2017, Reynolds used a website, social media accounts and email to solicit at least 22,190.542 bitcoin, valued at about $143 million at the time, from more than 1,000 customers worldwide, including at least 169 individuals living in the U.S., according to the release.
- Among other things, Reynolds falsely represented that his company traded customer bitcoin deposits in virtual currency markets and employed specialized virtual currency traders who generated guaranteed trading profits.
- The judgment is the result of a 2019 enforcement action brought by the CFTC.
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.
