Founder and former CEO of the failed CryptocurrencyCELSIUS NetworkProsecutors said to a judge on Tuesday that he should face 20 years of bars for lying and self -dealing that costs customers billions of dollars in losses.
Alexander Machinsky59, thousands of clients told that their money was safe and safe, which led to the flow of investors more than 20 billion dollars in percentage by 2021, and they wrote in a request before the issuance of a ruling on May 8 in the Manhattan Federal Court.
“They were not,” the general prosecutors said, noting that Celsius announced his bankruptcy in 2022 and acknowledged that the customers could not return to what they have invested.
Prosecutors said that Mashinsky made CELSIUS profitability and puts customer money at the mercy of unpopular loans and undeclared market bets. Meanwhile, the company announced itself as a modern bank where people can deposit the assets of encryption safely and gain interest.
“Machinsky’s behavior made him rich,” they wrote.
As they were subjected to the judge, defense lawyers said that their client must face more than a year and one day after he admitted that he was guilty in December on charge of federal fraud. When doing this, he admitted to misleading customers between 2018 and 2022.
The defense blamed Celsius for a “catastrophic decline” in the encrypted currency markets in May and June of 2022.
Lawyers said: “His actions were never predatory, exploitative, or Final.
They also indicated that Machinsky was living a difficult early life in a small Ukrainian town in the former Soviet Union, whose family fled when she was 7 years old. They moved to Israel, where Machinsky served for a period of three years in the Israeli Defense Forces as a fighter pilot.
“This issue is not related to a greedy, greedy deception that I believed could escape the stealing of the people’s wealth acquired money to satisfy its troubled pleasures. It is not a trick company that was subjected to a cards when it was bankrupt. This is after that, shallow and destroying humanity that does not apply here.”
Lawyers Machinski described as a loyal father of six children who deserve to be tolerated in part because his crimes arose from “legitimate efforts that crossed criminality as a result of unexpected difficulties.”
In his call, Mashinsky admitted illegally manipulating Clepto’s distinctive symbol as he secretly sold his symbols at inflated prices for a pocket of about $ 48 million.
In court, he admitted that in 2021 he publicly suggested that there is organizational approval on the company’s movements because he knows that customers “will find wrong comfort” with this.
He said that in 2019, he was selling encryption symbols although he told the audience that he was not, knowing that customers would be comfortable with it as well.
An accusation regulation claimed that Machinsky Roj to Silicius through media interviews, his social media accounts and his website, along with broadcasting a weekly session “Ask Mashinsky anything” was published on Celsius “and YouTube channel.
This story was originally shown on Fortune.com
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