Bitcoin Forum

Maksim Zaslavskiy, a computer programmer from Brooklyn and the first person in the United States to be convicted of running a fraudulent initial coin offering (ICO) has been sentenced to a year and a half behind bars as over 1000 investors were duped.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-ico-scammer-sentenced-to-18-months-in-jail?utm_source=Telegram&utm_medium=social


I think more of this Jail time will help sanitise the cryptocurrency space. What do you guys think?

Yes, I totally agree. Because they are the ones who are detrimental, both from the investor side and from the side of the crypto world itself. Investors lost their money and also trust in the ICO that has happened for the last 2 years. And finally, even ordinary people know the world of crypto through this bad news so that crypto is considered a negative thing.

This news should further discourage fraudsters but I doubt they will eventually stop doing such illicit  activities since the accused got only a few months of jail sentence! Well anybody could do that jail term in exchange for a few million bucks!

If we truly desire to sanitize the crypto space on these type of frauds, then the justice system should amend its laws and imposed life imprisonment on those who could be found guilty of these acts! Imho.

e was located in US territory and what about those scammers are not locating on US territory? I meant about there was a lot of scammers located abroad. We know that in other countries there was no a lot of specified regulation to protect the investors. I have seen there was a police institution already denied a report who has been made by the victim of scam ico.

I glad to see those scammers are being targetted to put into the jail. But the real problem is not so many countries are aware about this problem and they are not having enough regulation to protect the investors from the scammers in crypto.

If you want to sanitize the entire cryptocurrency world, these scammers should not only be given a short jail vacation sentence. 18 months is too short if what they did was tarnishing the reputation of crypto, victimizing investors of thousands or even millions of their hard earned money, getting innocent people get involved into a scam, etc. And this 18 months sentence could still be further shorten with the help of their lawyers

Absolutely. Scam ICOs are a plague of the crypto space and should be regulated as such.

However, it is not always possible to enforce the rules 100%, because of the fact that the real life identities of developers are rarely known for certain for scam projects anyways. They manipulate and photoshop team member pictures to appear realistic, but they aren't representative of the actual scammers behind the project.

As a result, enforceability is spotty at best. You can't really ask for much more.

It's a good start but i think that they will set some scarier examples if this won't work as an example, because 18 months is nothing if you get to keep the cryptos. It might be harder to turn them to fiat after that, but there are always ways.

Only the incompetent will end up in jail. HE gathered only $300000 in ICO. Big scammers gathered many millions. They just hired good lawyers and will be perfectly fine.

Has sending more criminals to jail stop the occurrence of crime in the society, new way will just be developed by this scammers and the continuity of the scams will continue probably leading to more project developers, hiding their identify becomes a more occurring situation, disguising themselves under the anonymousity crab. The issue in the community isn't about the scamners but the vulnerability of the investors. Spending more time creating awareness to this users on how this scams can be spotted and avoided will do more good then chasing after the scammers.

Those with good lawyers or identify aren't yet public could easily escape this jail terms but when the Investor get educated, less and less success stories for this scammers will be recorded and it'll make the industry less attractive to scammers, reducing scams in generally.

Remember this can o ly apply to those countries where cryptocurrency is tagged as not legal. If developers stay anon such cases won't be encountered. Another measure should be put in place.

Thats a very short punishment but it could be reasonable for the dense of his case. The scammers deserves big punishment to deter them from propagating in the crypto space victimising innocent investors who are only looking for chance to improve life.

Did I miss something in that article about refund? they should have refunded the investors and wow that 18 months is to short for such a big amount, he will get out in no time and he will enjoy the money he scammed, anyway I think the judge will freeze his account and compensate investors.

The punishment is enough to make a deterrent, but outside there are still many fake developers who are still hanging around that need to be cleaned up as well.
Because usually approaching halving will appear quite surprising new tokens and coins, which could potentially fake projects as well.

Yes. More!
There have been too much scam and that can be seen here in this forum.
They just got away from it without even feeling that cold taste behind bars. They must!

Tracing them will be easy if the government will really help. I do think they should be strict in this process. A lot of money is at stake and this could minimize the creation of useless ICO which are now in great numbers. Somehow that could also push awareness.

Yea right but was the stolen money refunded back to the victims? that is the main issue, the jail term is too small too, it should be over 10years in jail not a single year and half, scammers need to be dealt with heavily

This won't make scammers to stop scamming people because there is huge money scammers used to make from it so they will always try to take the risk, i think its better to use technology to stop scammers instead of hunting for scammers

Criminals of nowadays careless about one getting apprehended, it won't change their mind, they will say that the apprehended personal time was up, come to think of it crypto scammers are not that hard to catch if government want to get them because crypto scammers don't hide their faces anymore

Yes it's very important that funds are refunded and the scammer's assets are all frozen, so even if he has a short term no one has lost their funds because each one was refunded and the money was stolen returned, there should be more prosecuted and put to jail, we have thousands of scammers here in Cryptocurrency.

This is nothing but a too fair judgement for scammers, they won't stop scamming, if a harsh judgement are been made on them they will try to adjust, set a good example using one a scape goat and the rest will adjust

This is a good way In order to pay those who are doing the scam project, but you know if there are big money involve , its easy to people who make that fraud to just forget anything and move to another country and use that money to start a new life there.

in the United States getting fraudulent developers into prison is easy but outside the United States? not as easy. The law enforcement in each countries around the world varies from excellent to really bad. These fraudulent developers could also flee to third world countries although the interpol might be after them but it takes a lot of time to search for them. I do support this kind of real punishment toward all those fraud people but I really hope that such punishment could be enforced in the third world countries as well.Yeah, it's always better to prevent these scammers rather than jails them since the losses might be enormous. There's no guarantee that we could catch them as well.

The fact is the jail sentence is very low, they get released after time is up and after freedom they start enjoying the money they scammed off people, the right penalty should be all scammers that are caught must return every penny back to victims after jail terms, this will be a big lesson for the rest

Well done. He even deserves more jail time.

Depends to me how much he defrauded from investors. 18 months in jail earning let us say 1k a month in USD for me is impossible in this life. So if I scammed even 20k, it would be worthwhile, since I would be fed in prison, maybe even get free study and free time in the gym, walk out and have 20k in savings to spend.

Of course I might say I am reformed and get a nice hacking tech job too!

I believe that it is a good sign towards the future of crypto currencies. Finally, there is a case where a scammer got into jail for what he has done. Hopefully, it will continue and will make less people to start fraud projects.

If the developers identities are known, then they can be sued with appropriate violations regardless of their nationalities or if the country is crypto friendly or not but cases like this would be likely prosecuted successfully if there is strong evidence and if the country where those criminals are residing have extradition treaties with the plaintiffs country.

That is why its never advisable to invest into ICO's or IEO's without verifying first the real identities of developers or proponents of the project because if the project turned out to be a scam then the investors can file fraud charges to them and will  have a higher chance of getting back their investments.


Of course! A longer jail sentence should be given to these criminals if proven guilty aside from paying full and appropriate compensation to the aggrieved parties.

That's true. With a good legal counsel, fraudulent ICO developers can still flourish. I remember EOS paying a few bucks as SEC fine despite generating billions in token sales.


I agree harsher judgments should be doled out to discourage scammers. Like someone said, getting a few jail time for millions of dollars can be a very fair or lucrative trade for some people