Federal trials have resulted in a programmer of BitClub Network, BCN, pleading guilty to have played a role in building up a multi-million-dollar scam.
BCN was in the news during December last year when charged by federal prosecutors for having duped customers to the tune of $722 Million. Silviu Catalin Balaci, a 35-year old employee of BCN, has accepted that he has committed the Ponzi scheme defrauding investors of bitcoins for over five years.
The top boss of BCN, Russ Medlin, was arrested in Indonesia last month on more serious charges of child pornography and sexual assault. Medlin has been hence detained pending extradition proceedings by the US Attorney’s Office of the District of New Jersey, Department of Justice.
Other defendants of the wire fraud case, Matthew Goettsche, Jobadiah Weeks, and Joseph Abel, have been detained without bail, while Balaci has been released on bond based on his initial appearance before the court on July 8.
Balaci’s confessions of having manipulated the BCN website’s mining activity to make the customers stay invested in unregistered securities comes at a time when the economy is yet to recover from coronavirus pandemic impact. Investors who were already pulling out of cryptocurrencies are now likely to altogether lose their trust in bitcoin, once considered the safest and most secure form of retaining and transacting in-lieu of fiat currencies