The case against NovaTech is, at its core, a subtraction problem. Between August 2019 and April 2023, investors deposited about $1.16 billion into the platform. Roughly $26 million of that ever reached a trading venue, about 2.2% of every dollar deposited. The Office of the New York Attorney General is now asking a court to put a price on the difference.
On October 22, 2026, Attorney General Letitia James asked the New York Supreme Court to order founders Cynthia and Eddy Petion to pay roughly $1.37 billion in disgorgement, damages, and interest. The same day, her office announced that four of the scheme’s top promoters, Martin Zizi, Frantz Ciceron, James Corbett, and Ricardo Roy Sr., had agreed to pay a combined $5.98 million and to accept permanent bans from the securities, commodities, and cryptocurrency industries.
The scheme ran in two stages. AWS Mining sold mining contracts with promises of 15% to 20% monthly returns and 200% returns within 15 months, then collapsed by 2019 when it could not fund the promised payouts. The Petions followed with NovaTech, marketed it as a registered hedge fund broker, and advertised weekly returns of roughly 2% to 4%. More than 11,000 New Yorkers lost money, part of a group the office says reached hundreds of thousands of investors worldwide. Much of the recruiting happened in Haitian Creole, inside prayer groups and WhatsApp chats. When NovaTech collapsed in May 2023, tens of thousands of investors found they could not withdraw their funds.
The founders never answered the June 2024 Martin Act lawsuit, which alleged unregistered securities sales and an illegal chain-distributor scheme. A default judgment followed in August 2025, and they have not appeared since. That posture matters more than the headline number. A default judgment establishes liability without a trial, but it does not locate assets or produce records. The office’s filing states the defaulting defendants never turned over the investor records and accounting the court ordered.
This is the real tension in the case. Proving the fraud was comparatively easy: the gap between deposits and trading, and the filing’s finding that withdrawals and recruitment bonuses were paid from other investors’ deposits, make the Ponzi structure legible. Collecting the judgment is a different task. The promoters’ $5.98 million is disgorgement meant to return money to victims rather than a fine paid to the state, and it equals about 0.44% of the sum sought from the founders. The founders are outside the country and have produced no accounting, so a court order does not, by itself, put money back in anyone’s hands.
The pattern matches other recent crypto enforcement from the same office: a loss is far easier to prove than to recover. What NovaTech demonstrates is not that enforcement is ineffective, but that the distance between a proven fraud and a recovered loss is where most of the remaining work happens. The next measurable step is the court’s ruling on the inquest request. Whether any of the $1.37 billion is ever collected is an open question the filing itself does not answer.
Source: BlockchainReporter.