NY Seeks $1.37 Billion Judgment Against Operators of NovaTech Crypto Ponzi Scheme
Bitcoin Magazine NY Seeks $1.37 Billion Judgment Against Operators of NovaTech Crypto Ponzi Scheme Two successive crypto frauds took investors for more than $1.1 billion. Now New York's attorney gene...
Two successive crypto frauds took investors for more than $1.1 billion. Now New York's attorney general is asking a court to make the operators pay it back — with interest.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is trying to secure a $1.37 billion judgment against the operators of NovaTech and its predecessor AWS Mining, two successive cryptocurrency investment schemes that allegedly defrauded hundreds of thousands of investors worldwide out of more than $1 billion.
Alleged founders Cynthia and Eddy Petion never appeared in court and, according to the AG’s office, fled the country.
“NovaTech and AWS Mining scammed thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers by telling them they were making a safe investment when in reality, they were victims of a pyramid scheme,” James said in a statement. “These scammers targeted immigrant and religious communities with the promise of a better life but instead robbed them of their life savings.”
The schemes, AWS Mining and later NovaTech, relied on promoters who recruited heavily in Haitian and other immigrant communities — through prayer groups, WhatsApp chats, and ads in Haitian Creole.
AWS Mining sold crypto mining contracts promising 15 to 20 percent monthly returns and 200 percent within 15 months. It collapsed in 2019. The Petions then launched NovaTech, marketed as a registered hedge fund broker, promising weekly trading returns of two to four percent — more than 140 percent a year.
Those returns were fabricated, according to prosecutors. Records from B2Broker, which supplied NovaTech’s white-label trading platform, show that of the more than $1 billion investors deposited between 2019 and 2023, only about $26 million was ever actually traded — and NovaTech’s traders lost $18.2 million of that. Returns to earlier investors came from newer deposits, not trading. When NovaTech collapsed in mid-2023, tens of thousands of investors could not withdraw their funds.
The AG is also seeking $134.5 million the Petions allegedly withdrew to their own wallets from the investor account Cynthia Petion solely controlled, plus $4.7 million tied to the earlier AWS Mining scheme. A default judgment entered in August 2025 already bars the couple and their companies from the securities, commodities, and cryptocurrency industries.
Separately, four of the scheme’s top promoters have agreed to pay nearly $6 million in disgorgement to victims and accepted the same industry bans.
Asanat Analysis — Why it matters
New York's $1.37 billion judgment attempt against NovaTech operators signals escalating enforcement against retail-targeted crypto fraud schemes. The $1.1 billion+ loss figure places this among the largest Ponzi cases in crypto history, comparable to OneCoin's estimated $4–5 billion or the various defunct exchange collapses. This case matters because it demonstrates state-level AG offices are moving beyond cease-and-desist orders into asset recovery litigation, setting precedent for how jurisdictions pursue judgment enforcement against distributed operator networks—many of whom operate across borders with minimal on-chain traceability.
The case underscores a persistent structural vulnerability in retail crypto: the ease of re-engineering failed schemes under new branding. 'Two successive crypto frauds' suggests operators recycled playbooks after an initial collapse, exploiting marketing velocity and retail FOMO cycles faster than regulatory response time. This friction between enforcement speed and fraud iteration remains a key reason institutional custody, exchange regulation, and on-chain transparency initiatives retain regulatory priority. The judgment itself may prove difficult to collect, but it creates a liability record that complicates future fundraising and asset movement for implicated operators.
For the broader ecosystem, high-visibility fraud prosecutions carry dual effects: they justify stricter compliance frameworks regulators then apply to legitimate platforms, while simultaneously reinforcing retail wariness of non-custodial and unregulated lending products—a category that includes many DeFi protocols. The reputational cost to crypto adoption compounds with each headline case of this magnitude.