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Alex Mashinsky, founder of the collapse of the cryptographic lender Celsius Network, was sentenced to 12 years in prison after admitting his role in a program to defraud customers and manipulate a token using customer funds.
Mashinsky pleaded guilty of securities fraud and fraud in terms of raw materials in December. The federal prosecutors in New York said they attracted customers with high yield promises on digital deposits, while deceiving them on Celsius operations and using their deposits to increase the price of its own cryptographic token, Cel.
At its peak, Celsius maintained $ 25 billion in customer assets. But the bank was shaken by volatility on cryptographic markets in 2022, and hundreds of thousands of customers could not recover their funds after interrupting withdrawals.
District judge John Koeltl from the South New York district sentenced Mashinsky, 59, sentenced Mashinsky on Thursday. Mashinsky had previously agreed to lose more than $ 48 million, representing his personal product of the sale of tokens Cel before his erasure. His bank accounts were frozen by the American authorities after his indictment in 2023.
The conviction comes as US President Donald Trump has courted the cryptography industry, launched his own token and softened the administration approach to the application and monitoring of digital assets. In March, he forgiven the company behind the Crypto Exchange Bitmex – which pleaded guilty last year to break the law on the secret of the bank concerning the anti -money laundering controls. In addition, the new policies of the Ministry of Justice prohibit the prosecution of cryptographic companies for the actions of their users.
“The case of the tokenization and the use of digital assets is solid, but it is not a license to deceive,” said Jay Clayton, American lawyer for the South District in New York. “The rules against fraud always apply, and the SDNY will hold those who will flour them responsible for their crimes.”
Prosecutors had asked for a 20 -year prison sentence, saying in a file last month that Mashinsky was “a fraudster of epic proportions” and that “a serious sentence is justified”.
Mashinsky told a court in December that “what I did was bad and that I wanted to do what I can do things” and said that he had accepted the full responsibility of his actions.
In a legal file last week, Mashinsky said that the sentence should not exceed 366 days. He accused the government of having made a “submission to venom laces” in court and said that it was a “first time non -violent delinquency which pleaded guilty and accepts responsibility”.
The file said that he had been “chewed and humiliated” and that he was “tortured every day by his misdeeds and the pain he caused”.
Mashinsky was arrested and charged in 2023. His company had filed for the previous year, after a process of the cryptography market.
The prosecutors said that Mashinsky had presented Celsius as a “modern bank”, but that it had been a “risky investment fund”, and that Celsius had used the money of certain customers to manipulate the market of his CEL token, allowing him to sell his own assets above their market value.
