{"id":26977,"date":"2023-04-27T21:50:32","date_gmt":"2023-04-27T21:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/us-court-orders-south\/"},"modified":"2023-04-27T21:55:05","modified_gmt":"2023-04-27T21:55:05","slug":"us-court-orders-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/us-court-orders-south\/","title":{"rendered":"US court orders South African firm&#8217;s CEO to pay $3.4 billion for bitcoin fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Kanishka Singh and Chris Prentice<\/p>\n<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) &#8211;     A federal judge in Texas ordered the head of a South African firm to pay a whopping $3.4 billion for what the U.S. commodities regulator said was its largest-ever fraud case involving bitcoin.<\/p>\n<p>Cornelius Johannes Steynberg was ordered to pay $1.7 billion in restitution to victims of the fraud scheme and another $1.7 billion as a civil penalty, a record for any Commodity Futures Trading Commission case, the regulator said in a statement on Thursday.<\/p>\n<p>Steynberg, whose last known residence was in South Africa, could not immediately be reached for comment. <\/p>\n<p>The CFTC charged Steynberg in July, saying Mirror Trading solicited bitcoin online from thousands of people to purportedly operate a commodity pool. The firm claimed to trade off-exchange, retail foreign currency with participants who were not eligible to trade, the regulator said.<\/p>\n<p>From May 2018 to March 2021, Steynberg accepted and misappropriated at least 29,421 bitcoin &#8211; valued at over $1.7 billion by the end of the period &#8211; from about 23,000 participants from the U.S., including more than 1,300 in Texas, the CFTC said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The default judgment against Steynberg was granted by Judge Lee Yeakel in the Western District of Texas, according to a court filing.<\/p>\n<p \/>\n<p> (Reporting by Kanishka Singh and Chris Prentice; Editing by Daniel Wallis)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/us-court-orders-south\/file-photo-signage-is-seen-outside-of-cftc-in-washington\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-content\/uploads\/Reuters_Direct_Media\/USOnlineReportTechnologyNews\/tagreuters.com2023binary_LYNXMPEJ3Q111-VIEWIMAGE.jpg\" alt=\"tagreuters.com2023binary_LYNXMPEJ3Q111-VIEWIMAGE\"><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Kanishka Singh and Chris Prentice WASHINGTON (Reuters) &#8211; A federal judge in Texas ordered the head of a South African firm to pay a whopping $3.4 billion for what the U.S. commodities regulator said was its largest-ever fraud case involving bitcoin. Cornelius Johannes Steynberg was ordered to pay $1.7 billion in restitution to victims [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":26978,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1220],"tags":[1223],"class_list":["post-26977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-u-s-technology","tag-updated"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-content\/uploads\/Reuters_Direct_Media\/USOnlineReportTechnologyNews\/tagreuters.com2023binary_LYNXMPEJ3Q111-VIEWIMAGE.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26977"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26979,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26977\/revisions\/26979"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}