Founder of notorious cryptocurrency exchange sentenced to 20 years in prison

The Southern District Court of New York has sentenced Carl Sebastian Greenwood, co-founder of the cryptocurrency OneCoin, for organizing a $ 4 billion digital asset fraud scheme and embezzling $ 300 million from defrauded investors. Greenwood was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The court also ordered him to pay a fine equal to the amount of the misappropriated funds.

The fraudulent OneCoin crypto project was launched in 2014 in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. The exchange was selling tokens of the same name through a multi-level marketing (MLM) system, positioning the asset as a «bitcoin killer» capable of bringing about a «financial revolution.»

In 2015, the company started operating in the United States. In total, from the fourth quarter of 2014 to the fourth quarter of 2016, the organizers raised more than $ 4 billion from 3.5 million investors worldwide using false claims. In fact, OneCoin coins had no intrinsic value or utility, and their value was set arbitrarily, without taking into account market realities. Thus, the asset’s price gradually increased from 0.5 to 29.95 euros until January 2019.

the 46-year-old Greenwood, who has Swedish and British citizenship, was the general distributor and leader of an MLM network, whose members received commissions for attracting new users to purchase OneCoin packages. The defendant himself received 5% of monthly sales, earning a total of $ 300 million, which he then spent on luxury hotel stays, yacht and luxury real estate in Spain, Dubai and Thailand, as well as a trip around the world by private jet.