Jeremy Spence, also known as ‘Coin Signals,’ has been sentenced to 42 months in federal prison after he was found guilty of scamming more than 170 victims through dubious digital currency funds he operated.
The sentence was announced this week by Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The court’s press release explains that Spence pleaded guilty to the charges leveled against him.
According to the allegations, Spence, 25, operated a digital currency Ponzi scheme between November 2017 through April 2019. Spence deceived his would-be investors with claims that he was running a highly profitable digital currency fund, while in reality, he was incurring losses in his trades.
One instance of such solicitations under false pretenses the court cited happened in 2018. In an online forum, the Spence told investors that his trades had raked in returns of more than 148%, while his trades during the period had resulted in net losses.
He forestalled withdrawals by forging false trading account balances and paid old investors with funds from new victims to keep the scheme going. He solicited “more than $5 million” through these methods while operating the funds.
“In total, Spence distributed cryptocurrency worth approximately $2 million to investors substantially from funds previously deposited by other investors,” the release noted.
Apart from his 42 months supervised release sentence, the Bristol, Rhode Island resident…
