NY seeks $1.37 billion from NovaTech crypto Ponzi scheme operators

Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is pursuing a $1.37 billion judgment against the individuals behind NovaTech and its earlier entity AWS Mining. These two back-to-back cryptocurrency investment schemes are said to have cheated hundreds of thousands of global investors of over $1 billion.

Cynthia and Eddy Petion, the purported founders, did not show up in court and, per the attorney general's office, have left the country.

"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 in a statement. "These scammers targeted immigrant and religious communities with the promise of a better life but instead robbed them of their life savings."

The two schemes, AWS Mining followed by NovaTech, depended on promoters that heavily recruited within Haitian and other immigrant communities. They used prayer groups, WhatsApp messages, and advertisements in Haitian Creole.

AWS Mining offered crypto mining contracts that promised monthly returns of 15 to 20 percent and 200 percent over 15 months. That scheme folded in 2019. Afterwards, the Petions started NovaTech, which was promoted as a registered hedge fund broker and promised weekly trading returns of two to four percent, equivalent to over 140 percent annually.

Those promised returns were invented, prosecutors say. According to records from B2Broker, the provider of NovaTech's white-label trading platform, of the more than $1 billion that investors put in from 2019 to 2023, only around $26 million was ever traded. NovaTech's traders lost $18.2 million of that amount. Payments to earlier investors were made using new deposits, not trading profits. When NovaTech went under in mid-2023, tens of thousands of investors were unable to access their money.

The attorney general is additionally pursuing $134.5 million that the Petions purportedly transferred to their own wallets from an investor account that Cynthia Petion exclusively controlled, as well as $4.7 million linked to the earlier AWS Mining scheme. A default judgment from August 2025 already prohibits the couple and their firms from participating in the securities, commodities, and cryptocurrency sectors.

In a separate development, four of the scheme's leading promoters have consented to pay close to $6 million in disgorgement to victims and have also accepted the same industry prohibitions.