The United States authorities have charged four co-founders of the cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme Forsage, which raised around $340 million by running the decentralized finance (DeFi) investment platform.
Announced on Wednesday, the indictment brought by a federal grand jury in the District of Oregon named four Russian nationals: Vladimir Okhotnikov, Olena Oblamska, Mikhail Sergeev, and Sergey Maslakov. They promoted Forsage as a legitimate system with “low-risk and lucrative investment opportunity” on social media, but in reality, it was a fraudulent scheme.
They were charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which contains a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.
The court documents detailed that the four defendants coded and deployed smart contracts with malicious codes that systemized the process of transferring the funds deposited by new investors to the existing ones, making it a classic Ponzi scheme. They even combined the Pyramid scheme on three blockchains: Ethereum
