A United States court has ordered a South African citizen to pay over $3 billion in fines for duping American investors through a fraudulent Bitcoin investment scheme.
Cornelius Johannes Steynberg was ordered by a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to pay $1.73 billion in restitution to defrauded victims as well as $1.73 billion in civil monetary penalties, with the total fines coming to over $3.4 billion, according to an April 27 press release by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
This is the highest civil monetary penalty ever ordered in a CFTC case. It is also the largest fraudulent scheme involving Bitcoin that has been charged in any case by the agency….