In connection with a fraudulent commodity pool scheme involving Bitcoin, a Texas district court judge has ordered Cornelius Johannes Steynberg, the CEO of Mirror Trading International Proprietary Limited (MTI), to pay a record-breaking fine of $3.4 billion
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said that it was the greatest fraud involving Bitcoin ever charged in a CFTC case and the highest civil monetary penalty awarded in any CFTC case.
The CFTC claims that Steynberg took at least 29,421 BTC from 23,000 people in the US and abroad between May 2018 and March 2021, which was worth more than $1.7 billion at the time.
Steynberg, who served as the CEO of MTI, participated in a global deceptive multilevel marketing scam to entice people to donate Bitcoin in exchange for their membership in an unregulated commodity pool, which had a value of more than $1.7 billion as of March 2021.
Steynberg was found responsible for fraud involving retail foreign exchange transactions, fraud committed by a party connected to a commodity pool operator, registration violations, and noncompliance with CPO rules. He was also required to pay a further $1.73 billion civil monetary penalty on top of the $1.73 billion in compensation to victims of fraud.
According to the CFTC, Steynberg either directly or indirectly misappropriated all of the Bitcoin he received from pool participants. Steynberg is permanently prohibited from acting in a manner that contravenes the Commodity Exchange Act and is not permitted to sign up with the CFTC or trade in any markets that are subject to CFTC regulation.
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