The federal large jury in Oregon County charged four Russian citizens, the founders of the Forsage Decentralized Finance (Defi) cryptocurrency investment platform, and the global financial pyramid, which attracted $ 340 million.
Forsage was advertised as a “smart contract system”, which automatically distributes income among investors based on the algorithm, without requests for the withdrawal of funds manually. The project promised 100% transparency, full decentralization, single -rat transactions, the absence of the owner/administrator and the lack of likelihood of fraud/sudden disconnection of the platform. As well as the absence of an involved company or third party.
However, the reality turned out to be cruel: many Forsage investors quickly found that they did not make any profit and have no opportunity to dispose of invested funds.
defendants to Vladimir Okhotnikov, Elena Obomskaya, Mikhail Sergeyev and Sergey Maskalov, were charged with aggressive false advertising on social networks, the distribution of investment and business facilities associated with Forsage, among beginner investors.
Instead of the legal investment system, the accused encoded and introduced smart contracts into Forsage, which, in fact, systematized a combination of financial pyramids on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain and Tron.
“As soon as the investor invested in Forsage, having bought a” slot “in the Forsage smart contract, the smart contract automatically redirected the investor funds to other Forsage investors, so that earlier investors were paid funds from later investors”- US Ministry of Justice.
Using a forensic analysis of the blockchain, it was confirmed that more than 80% of Forsage investors received less ETH than they invested. About half of all investors did not receive anything at all.
Court documents show that the founders of the platform used a malicious code to send a significant part of investors beyond the Forsage – to cryptocurrency wallets that they controlled. This contradicted the promises of Forsage, including that “100% of income directly and transparently acts to the project participants with zero risk.”
If the four accused are found guilty of alleged crimes, they are facing the maximum imprisonment for a period of 20 years for each.
It is worth noting that the Forsage website and social networks are still functioning. According to the platform itself, at the moment, more than $ 1.5 billion is distributed among 2.7 million investors. As described above, it is unlikely that these figures are at least somewhat corresponding to reality.