The co-founders of Hashflare, a crypto mining ponzi scheme that stole $577 million from hundreds of thousands of investors around the world, both pleaded guilty on Wednesday to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turõgin, both 40, were arrested in their native Estonia in November 2022 and extradited to the U.S. on an 18-count indictment. Yesterday, both men pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Between 2015 and 2019, Potapenko and Turõgin convinced Hashflare’s investors to rent a percentage of the scheme’s crypto mining operations in exchange for a percentage of the cryptocurrency Hashflare produced. But, according to court documents, Hashflare had only a tiny fraction of the mining equipment it purported to have – less than 1% of the computing power Potapeno and Turõgin had sold. When investors tried to claim their proceeds, prosecutors say the two men either resis
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