Million

James

Four

Billion

<img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://blockchainreporter.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/blockchain8-6.webp" alt="blockchain8 MAIN" style="float: right; margin-left: 5px;" title="NY AG Seeks $1.37 Billion From NovaTech Founders as Promoters Settle for Nearly $6 Million 11">
<p>$1,160,544,294 went in. $25,994,603 ever reached a trading platform. The gap between those two figures — 97.76% of every dollar NovaTech collected — is the entire case New York Attorney General Letitia James is now asking a court to price, <a href="https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2026/attorney-general-james-secures-nearly-6-million-crypto-scammers-who-targeted" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">per the Office of the Attorney General’s October 22 announcement</a>.</p>
<p>On October 22, James asked the New York Supreme Court to order NovaTech founders Cynthia and Eddy Petion to pay $1.37 billion in disgorgement, damages and interest. The same day, four of the scheme’s top promoters agreed to pay a combined $5.98 million and accepted permanent bans from the securities, commodities and cryptocurrency industries. The founders have not appeared in the case since a default judgment was entered against them in August 2025.</p>
<p>“NovaTech and AWS Mining scammed thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers by telling them they were making a safe investment when in reality, they were victims of a pyramid scheme,” James said. “These scammers targeted immigrant and religious communities with the promise of a better life but instead robbed them of their life savings.”</p>
<h2 id="the-three-row-bill">The Three-Row Bill</h2>
<p>The monetary request lives in one filing: an affirmation from Senior Enforcement Counsel Tanya Trakht, docketed as NYSCEF Document 134 on October 22 at 11:10 a.m. It asks the court to award three sums. AWS Mining: $930,195 in principal plus $525,471 in interest, $1,455,666 total. Cynthia Petion’s AWS Mining profits: $3,000,000 plus $1,694,712, $4,694,712 total. The NovaTech fraud: $1,134,549,691 in disgorgement plus $232,473,894 in prejudgment interest, $1,367,023,585 total.</p>
<p>Add the three rows and the state is seeking $1,373,173,963. The largest figure is not an estimate. It is the deposited total — $1,160,544,294 — minus the one sum the OAG accepts as a legitimate offset: the $25,994,603 placed with B2Brokers for trading. That subtraction is the arithmetic of the case, and the affirmation lays it out in <a href="https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/settlements-agreements/new-york-v-nova-tech-ltd-et-al-affirmation-2026.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">the inquest filing</a>.</p>
<h2 id="what-26-million-out-of-1-16-billion-reveals">What $26 Million Out of $1.16 Billion Reveals</h2>
<p>Divide $25,994,603 by $1,160,544,294 and the result is 2.24%. Less than a quarter of every ten dollars deposited between August 2019 and April 2023 ever touched a trading venue. Trakht’s affirmation states what that ratio means: “all withdrawals from NovaTech’s CoinPayments wallets, including purported returns on investment and recruitment bonuses, were made from the funds deposited into NovaTech by investors.”</p>
<p>That sentence is the ponzi made legible. No trading profit funded any payout. Every withdrawal, every “weekly return,” every recruitment bonus was another depositor’s money moving hands. The 2.24% figure separates this case from a business that simply failed. A failed trading shop still trades something. NovaTech traded almost nothing and paid investors anyway, which is the structural signature of a pyramid.</p>
<p>The promoter settlements are the second calculation worth doing. Martin Zizi will pay $2.9 million, Frantz Ciceron $2.05 million, James Corbett $750,000, and Ricardo Roy, Sr. $275,861 — $5,975,861 in total. Against the $1,367,023,585 sought from the founders, that is 0.44%. The state has secured less than half of one percent of the sum it is asking a court to award from the two people who ran the scheme.</p>
<p>Those four payments are disgorgement for the benefit of victims, not fines paid to the state. They are meant to flow back to people the AG says were recruited through the same prayer groups and WhatsApp chats the scheme used to reach its marks. The promoters who pulled them in are now permanently out of the securities, commodities and cryptocurrency industries, but the money they are returning is a fraction of what the investors put in.</p>
<h2 id="from-mining-contracts-to-trading-packages">From Mining Contracts to Trading Packages</h2>
<p>The scheme ran in two acts. Act one was AWS Mining, which sold mining contracts with promises of 15% to 20% monthly returns and 200% returns within 15 months. It collapsed by April 2019 without generating enough to pay its promised profits and recruitment commissions. Act two was NovaTech, which the Petions marketed as a registered hedge fund broker — it was not — with returns of roughly 2% to 4% per week.</p>
<p>More than 11,000 New Yorkers lost money, part of what the AG says were hundreds of thousands of investors worldwide. The OAG describes a specific targeting method: advertisements in Haitian Creole, recruiting inside prayer groups and WhatsApp group chats, religious messages attached to the pitch. Cynthia Petion was the CEO and sole shareholder of Nova Tech Ltd. Eddy Petion was the COO overseeing daily trading.</p>
<p>The case file traces the fraud from its first court appearance. The AG sued on June 6, 2024, alleging violations of the Martin Act, unregistered securities sales, and an illegal chain-distributor scheme. The defendants never answered. On August 4, 2025, the court entered a default order finding each jointly and severally liable, banned them from the industry, and set damages to be fixed by inquest. The founders were gone before that order landed.</p>
<h2 id="the-collection-problem">The Collection Problem</h2>
<p>The real tension in this story is not whether the scheme was a fraud — the August 2025 default order already established that — but whether any of the $1.37 billion will ever be collected. A default judgment is a paper victory when the defendants are outside the country and have produced no records, no accounting, and no appearance. The affirmation states the defaulting defendants failed to turn over the investor records and full accounting the court ordered.</p>
<p>The one window into the earlier AWS Mining losses shows how incomplete the record is. Promoter Frantz Ciceron handed the OAG a list of 204 victims who put in at least $930,195, a list the filing calls a small subset of thousands. Cynthia Petion admitted in a WhatsApp message to profiting at least $3 million from AWS Mining alone.</p>
<p>The gap between secured and sought is the same one the federal government faced when it <a href="https://blockchainreporter.net/us-restrained-938m-scam-crypto/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">restrained $938 million in scam-linked crypto</a> that could not simply be handed back to victims. It also runs through the <a href="https://blockchainreporter.net/cftc-cash-fx-group-ponzi-scheme/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">CFTC’s $950 million case against Cash FX Group</a>: enforcement can prove a loss far more easily than it can recover it.</p>
<p>The case also fits a longer line of New York crypto enforcement from the same office. It settled with Galaxy Digital for $200 million over Luna token sales in March 2025, secured more than $5 million from crypto platform Uphold in April 2026, and this month obtained an industry ban against a former crypto CEO who defrauded investors. NovaTech is the largest of those actions, and the pattern is consistent: unregistered dealers selling something that was never there to sell.</p>
<p>The next observable step is the court’s ruling on the inquest. If the court grants the full request, the Petions will owe $1.37 billion on paper. Whether the OAG can locate assets, enforce the judgment, or bring the founders back to account is the open question the filing does not answer.</p>
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 <p>Disclosure: This article does not represent investment advice. The content and materials featured on this page are for educational purposes only.</p>
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NY AG Seeks $1.37 Billion From NovaTech Founders as Promoters Settle for Nearly $6 Million

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