ChainCatcher news, the SEC announced charges against Cynthia Petion and Eddy Petion, as well as their company NovaTech Ltd., accusing them of implementing a fraudulent scheme that raised over $650 million in crypto assets from more than 200,000 investors worldwide, including many investors from the Haitian-American community. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission also charged Martin Zizi, Dapilinu Dunbar, James Corbett, Corrie Sampson, John Garofano, and Marsha Hadley with promoting NovaTech to investors.According to the SEC's charges, from 2019 to 2023, the Petions operated NovaTech as a multi-level marketing (MLM) and crypto asset investment project. They claimed that NovaTech would invest investors' funds in crypto assets and the foreign exchange market to entice investors. Cynthia Petion assured investors that their investments would be safe and promised, "In this project, you can profit from day one because you can get this money back again."In reality, NovaTech used most of the investors' funds to pay existing investors and to pay commissions to promoters, using only a small portion of investors' funds for trading. The complaints also allege that the Petions misappropriated millions of dollars in investor assets. The complaint states that when NovaTech eventually collapsed, most investors were unable to withdraw their investments, resulting in significant losses.

ChainCatcher news, according to Decrypt, New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a lawsuit against two cryptocurrency companies suspected of fraud in the state, accusing them of deceiving hundreds of thousands of investors, with the amount involved exceeding $1 billion.The companies being sued include the cryptocurrency exchange NovaTech and the mining company AWS Mining, which are accused of "engaging in illegal pyramid schemes," having stolen over $1 billion in cryptocurrency from investors, including 11,000 New Yorkers. Letitia James stated that she would ban these two companies from operating in New York and vowed to crack down on cryptocurrency fraudsters.AWS Mining and its promoters (including Panama residents Cynthia and Eddy Petion) had promised investors high returns through cryptocurrency mining operations, but in reality, the company could not sustain the promised returns in the long term and ultimately collapsed in 2019. Afterward, the Petion couple launched NovaTech, continuing to use similar strategies to attract customers, but the profits for investors were actually generated from the funds of new investors. Prosecutors revealed that the platform only processed $26 million in cryptocurrency transactions from 2019 to 2023.