New York Seeks $1.37 Billion From NovaTech Founders Who Fled US

New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking roughly $1.37 billion from Cynthia and Eddy Petion, the founders of the collapsed crypto trading platform NovaTech, according to a filing submitted Thursday in New York County Supreme Court. Collecting the money may prove harder than winning it: James said the couple fled the United States before an August 2025 default judgment was entered against them.

The requested award covers damages, disgorgement and interest. It follows a default judgment issued after the Petions failed to respond to the state's lawsuit, a judgment that also barred them from the securities, commodities and crypto industries.

James also announced settlements totaling nearly $6 million with four of the scheme's top promoters: Martin Zizi, Frantz Ciceron, Ricardo Roy Sr. and James Corbett. The four will pay the money to benefit victims and accepted permanent bans from the securities, commodities and crypto industries.

How the scheme worked

The Attorney General first sued NovaTech and AWS Mining in June 2024, alleging the companies defrauded investors of more than $1 billion. Two months later, in August 2024, the SEC charged the Petions and others over what the regulator called a $650 million fraud.

According to the Attorney General's office, the Petions targeted immigrant communities, particularly Haitian New Yorkers, through prayer groups, social media and WhatsApp chats, using advertisements in Haitian Creole and religious messaging. More than 11,000 New Yorkers were among the hundreds of thousands of investors worldwide who put money into the platform.

"These scammers targeted immigrant and religious communities with the promise of a better life but instead robbed them of their life savings," James said in a statement.

NovaTech falsely marketed itself as a registered hedge fund broker licensed to trade crypto in the United States, according to the state. It advertised returns of 2% to 4% a week, which compounds to more than 140% a year, a figure that dwarfs the roughly 10% average annual return of the S&P 500 over the long run.

Where the money actually went

The advertised returns did not come from trading. Payment processor data shows NovaTech sent just under $26 million to its trading provider between 2019 and 2023 and lost about $18.2 million of that amount, the state said. Weekly payouts and recruiting bonuses came from new investors' deposits, a classic Ponzi structure.

Data from payment processor CoinPayments shows investors deposited roughly $1.16 billion in crypto into NovaTech's wallet between August 2019 and May 2023. Cynthia Petion was the only authorized user on that account. At least $134.5 million flowed to wallets belonging to the Petions personally.

After subtracting the funds sent for trading, the state is seeking about $1.13 billion in disgorgement, plus $232 million in interest.

When NovaTech collapsed in 2023, tens of thousands of investors could not withdraw their funds.

A pattern that predates NovaTech

The Petions' path into crypto fraud began earlier. Before NovaTech, they were top U.S. promoters of AWS Mining, a scheme that promised monthly returns of 15% to 20% from crypto mining before it collapsed in 2019. Cynthia Petion admitted in a WhatsApp chat to making at least $3 million from that earlier operation, according to the filing.

What does this change for practitioners?

For compliance teams, the case is a template for how state and federal authorities now reconstruct crypto fraud flows: prosecutor filings cite processor-level data, wallet-level attribution and internal chat admissions rather than relying on victim complaints alone. The $6 million promoter settlements also signal that enforcement will reach the recruitment layer of multilevel crypto schemes, not only the principals.

For the more than 11,000 New York victims, the near-term question is recovery. With the Petions outside the country, disgorgement of $1.13 billion plus $232 million in interest depends on asset tracing and any future extradition or surrender. The settlement funds from the four promoters, nearly $6 million, represent a small fraction of the roughly $1.16 billion deposited, meaning distributions to victims are likely to be partial at best until the founders are located.