Benjamin Reynolds, the CEO behind the fictional bitcoin scheme, Control-Finance, has now been hit with a $572 million fine, following on from a default judgement made against him by a New York federal judge. Control-Finance had closed its social media pages in 2017. Still, CFTC has been unable to locate Reynolds since June 2019, when his illegal enterprise was uncovered in 2019. The agency, therefore, requested that the New York court settle the case despite Reynolds’ absence.
The complaint against Reynolds was filed in 2019. He has been accused of being the mastermind behind the pyramid scheme, which was promoted fraudulently as a cryptocurrency investment company based in the UK. The initial complaint claimed that Reynolds had misappropriated over 28,000 bitcoin from over 1,000 customers. The quantity of bitcoin obtained by Reynolds is estimated to be worth more than $1.24 billion.
Reynold’s Ponzi scheme worked by luring investors with fabricated trade reports made on a weekly basis. These reports promised investors 45% a month or 1.5% a day to take bitcoin from the victims. From May – September 2017, new participants promised to receive annual returns were advertised profits from a trading pool with no capacity to do so.
