4 Years in Prison for a Leader of the $100m Ponzi Scam ‘EmpiresX’
- Joshua Nichols, the ‘head trader’ for EmpiresX has been sentenced to more than four years in prison.
- Fellow co-conspirators Emerson (NYSE:) Pires and Flavio Goncalzes relocated to avoid sentencing.
- EmpiresX claimed investors could receive a 1% daily yield, but it was actually a Ponzi scheme.
Joshua Nichols, the alleged ‘head trader’ for EmpiresX, has been sentenced to 51 months in prison following his guilty plea on September 8th.
Nichols and his co-conspirators, who have now fled from Florida to Brazil, created the EmpiresX ‘cryptocurrency platform’ in 2020. EmpiresX touted ‘daily profits of one percent earned by a trading “bot” or Nicholas’ manual trading’.
This was actually just another Ponzi scheme. The ‘trading bot’ was completely fraudulent. The scheme worked by luring investors with the promise of daily profits, and early investors were in fact paid with the deposits of later investors. The scheme continued until withdrawals could no longer be completed, and the pyramid collapsed.
The defendants did transfer $1 million into a brokerage account and lost some money through bad trades. However, they also “misappropriated large sums of investors’ money to lease a Lamborghini, shop at Tiffany & Co., make a payment on a second home, and more” according to the SEC.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) claims that over $41.6 million was accepted from…
