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New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed suit against two purported crypto companies and their top promoters, a married couple, for allegedly operating two consecutive pyramid schemes that predominantly targeted Haitian immigrants to the U.S.
According to the complaint filed Thursday, the two schemes – AWS Mining and NovaTechFX – preyed on Creole-speaking church-goers via WhatsApp group chats, bilking investors out of more than $1 billion.
The first alleged scheme, an Australian company called AWS Mining, operated from 2017 until its collapse in 2019 and guaranteed investors a 200% return on their investment from crypto mining within 13-15 months. AWS Mining rewarded its promoters – including a Panama-based married couple originally from Florida, Cynthia and Eddy Petion – by giving them a 10% cut of the money invested by the new investors they recruited to the alleged scheme, along with bonuses and ceremonial titles.
The Petions were two of AWS Mining’s top promoters – each recruiting at least 200,000 investors to their “downline” – earning them both the ceremonial title of “President,” the suit alleged. After AWS Mining went bust in April 2019, the couple decided to start a new company together, NovaTechFX, with Cynthia serving as CEO and Eddy as COO. NovaTech claimed to be a crypto and foreign exchange trading platform that advertised up to 4% returns per week.
For their new company, the Petions allegedly recruited former promoters from AWS Mining – including Martin Zizi, James Corbett and Frantz Ciceron, who are also named as defendants in James’ suit – and, like AWS Mining, paid them a percentage of what the investors they recruited deposited in the platform.
Between August 2019 and April 2023, NovaTech’s investors deposited over $1 billion in the scheme, according to the complaint. In June 2022, shortly before the alleged scheme began to draw the attention of state securities regulators (who subsequently sent cease-and-desist letters to the company for fraud and securities violations) the Petions secretly sold their house in Florida and moved to Panama, James’ suit said.
Cynthia also advised her promoters to flee the U.S: “Leave the country,” Petion allegedly told Zizi. “They can’t serve you if they can’t find you lol.”
By December of 2022, the month after the spectacular collapse of crypto exchange FTX, many of NovaTech’s investors were requesting to withdraw their funds from the platform. In February 2023, the company halted withdrawals, and in May it shut down, failing to return “tens of thousands” of investors’ deposits and leaving them with “hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.”