The telltale warning to investors in crypto-investment platform USI Tech should have been when its chief executive, Horst Jicha, told them: “Now you might be thinking this is too good to be true.” Federal prosecutors say it was exactly that, and that the crypto investment strategy Jicha was pitching — which he promised would yield 1% returns every single day — was actually a scam.
The house of cards collapsed in 2018, when several state and provincial regulators in the U.S. and Canada issued cease and desist letters to USI Tech, saying it was selling unregistered securities and was in violation of a multitude of financial regulations. But instead of returning investors’ money, prosecutors said, Jicha quickly transferred $150 million to accounts he controlled overseas. For the next five years, Jicha — a 64-year-old German national — lived abroad. He was arrested on a sealed indictment just before Christmas when he tried to fly to Miami for a vacation, prosecutors said. “In the early days of crypto, the defendant deployed a multi-level marketing scheme to defraud U.S. investors excited about the crypto market,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said …
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The house of cards collapsed in 2018, when several state and provincial regulators in the U.S. and Canada issued cease and desist letters to USI Tech, saying it was selling unregistered securities and was in violation of a multitude of financial regulations. But instead of returning investors’ money, prosecutors said, Jicha quickly transferred $150 million to accounts he controlled overseas. For the next five years, Jicha — a 64-year-old German national — lived abroad. He was arrested on a sealed indictment just before Christmas when he tried to fly to Miami for a vacation, prosecutors said. “In the early days of crypto, the defendant deployed a multi-level marketing scheme to defraud U.S. investors excited about the crypto market,” Breon Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]