Cryptoscam gives rugby hero hefty prison sentence: light teammates for tons on

The crypto industry is still relatively in its infancy. This makes the sector in full development, both technologically and regulatory. Such a young industry is also accompanied by fraud and scams. Take the American ex-Rugby player Shane Donovan Moore, who decided to use crypto to enrich himself in an illegal way. That will now be dearly.

Moore abused crypto for his own luxury life

Shane Donovan Moore has been sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for setting up a crypto Ponzi-swam. He would have duped more than 40 investors for $ 900,000.

The 37-year-old Moore promised his victims every day 1 percent return through a fake crypto mining company called Quantum Donovan LLC. From January 2021 to October 2022 he mainly managed to convince fellow rugby players to invest in his project. He managed to convince them by a compelling story. It would be about high-quality mining equipment that would generate enormous profits. In reality, however, this equipment did not exist at all.

Instead of actually facilitating crypto mining, Moore used the money to pay for his luxury lifestyle. He also used part of the money to pay previous participants.

This is a typical feature of a Ponzi-swam. High returns are promised, but there is no real revenue model. The apparently high profit is paid through earlier investments. The scam eventually collapses when there are insufficient new inserts.

The judge clearly showed in her verdict that it was not just about financial loss. She stated that Moore also abused his status as a well -known athlete. According to the judge, he not only led his victims emotional and psychological damage, but he also affected their confidence.

Lessons from the past

Now that the Cryptomarkt is picking up again, it is also babysitting for more and more of this kind of fraudulent practices. The strong price increases attract the interest of many inexperienced investors. And that makes them an easy prey for criminals.

One of the most notorious Ponzi systems was BitConnect. The fraudulent company was active in 2017-2018 and promised extremely high daily returns through a so-called automated trading algorithm.

To invest, investors often had to fix their tokens for a certain period. Monthly returns rose on paper up to 40 percent, or an annual return of sometimes even 3,700 percent. The company managed to raise no less than 2.4 billion dollars, but eventually collapsed completely in 2018. The lesson we can learn from this: if something sounds too good to be true, then it is usually the case.