Prosecutors in China have charged a final four suspects of almost 100 that were said to be involved in an alleged $2 billion cryptocurrency pyramid scheme.
According to a news release from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate issued Wednesday, a local prosecutor’s office in Hunan province has charged the four individuals as part of a wider crackdown on “Weika Coin” – the Chinese name for OneCoin, a purported crypto investment scheme that has seen global law enforcement agencies launch investigations and issue warnings and fines.
The report indicates that the legal process launched in September 2017 and has been conducted in three phases that, in total, have seen 98 suspects prosecuted for allegedly deceiving investors across over 20 provinces in China. A number have been sentenced with up to four years in prison and/or fines ranging from 10,000-5 million yuan ($1,565-$783,000).
The prosecutor said, according to the report, that the scheme has so far developed 140 membership layers, across seven main pyramids in China, and involved up to 2 million victims. The amount of capital received from investors is as high as 15 billion yuan (around $2 billion), according to the report. Nearly 1.7 billion yuan ($266 million) has been recovered.
As reported by CoinDesk previously, the OneCoin cryptocurrency investment scheme, which was founded by an individual called Ruja Ignatova, has been scrutinized by police in a number of countries over suspicions that the scheme is fraudulent. Promoters of the scheme in Italy have also been fined millions of euros.
Authorities in India have also moved to arrest suspects associated with the scheme in April of last year and subsequently brought charges against Ignatova in July.
Most recently, the Bulgarian Special Prosecutor’s Office has joined forces with counterparts in Europe and the Americas to investigate the scheme.
Chinese yuan image via Shutterstock
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