An appeals court has upheld the fraud conviction of Randall Crater, who founded cryptocurrency project My Big Coin, and was sentenced to more than eight years in prison.
In a Feb. 23 filing with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel affirmed Crater’s conviction, more than a year after a jury found the cryptocurrency founder guilty of four counts of wire fraud. , three counts of illegal currency. trading and one count of operating an unlicensed money transfer business. Appeals judges Gustavo Gelpí, Jeffrey Howard and Julie Rikelman issued an opinion that Carter did not face new penalties for his involvement in the cryptocurrency scheme. of trial.
Crater’s legal team argued that the court violated his Sixth Amendment rights by not enforcing subpoenas against witnesses he claimed would help his case and by including testimony from cryptocurrency experts he deemed unqualified – Blockchain Intelligence Pamela Clegg, Vice President of Financial Investigations at CipherTrace. The judges said none of Creter's attorneys' arguments were "worthy of overturning."
The appellant states: “CipherTrace’s investigation revealed that MBC had no connection to a public blockchain and therefore lacked key indicators of functioning as a cryptocurrency until June 2017, which is before Crater identified MBC as a virtual equivalent to Bitcoin. Long after money has been marketed." Archive.
Crater founded My Big Coin in 2013 and falsely promoted the company as a cryptocurrency payment service, making approximately $7.6 billion in ill-gotten gains from 55 victims between 2014 and 2017. The founder also claims that the platform’s token is backed by gold and that the company has partnered with Mastercard to develop a user credit card. The Justice Department filed criminal charges against Kreit in February 2019. He was convicted in January 2023 and sentenced to 100 months in prison. He was also ordered to pay more than $7.6 million in restitution to his victims — funds he used to buy homes, cars and antiques, according to prosecutors.
U.S. authorities have filed criminal charges against prominent figures in the cryptocurrency space, including former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, and former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Zhao pleaded guilty to one felony count and is expected to be sentenced in April. In November, a jury found Bankman-Fried guilty on seven counts, and sentencing is scheduled for March 28. Masinski is awaiting trial in September.
