Bitcoin, the world’s most popular, well-known, and valuable cryptocurrency, was released just over a decade ago by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, who was either a person or a group of people – to this date, nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto actually is.
Just like with currencies and financial instruments, people trade bitcoin on exchanges. Most of these exchanges, as most modern financial exchanges, do business through the World Wide Web.
One of the world’s first cryptocurrency exchanges was Mt. Gox, which was launched some 18 months after Bitcoin was made available to the public. Mt. Gox was hit by a major bitcoin theft, in which some 850,000 units of the cryptocurrency were stolen. At the time, when one bitcoin was worth some $700 in terms of United States Dollars, the bitcoins were worth a collective $450 million.
Since then, the world of crypto has been plagued by tons of scams, thefts, and other illegal activity.
One of the largest cryptocurrency scams on today’s global market was that of Argyle Coin, LLC. Based in Florida, Argyle Coin was founded and operated by Jose Angel Aman. According to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the go-to government agency for all financial fraud perpetrated here in the United States, it recently filed for and received a court order to bring the operations of Argyle Coin, an alleged Ponzi scheme, to an end.
Currently, according to the SEC, Argyle Coin is worth roughly $30 million. The regulatory body detailed in a press release yesterday, Tuesday, May 21, 2019, that Argyle Coin, LLC, had successfully targeted upward of 300 investors to hand over their money to the company, which claimed that it was backed by substantial investments in diamonds.
According to the SEC, two other business entities owned by Jose Angel Aman, working under the names of Eagle Financial Diamond Group, Inc., and natural Diamonds Investment Co., are also part of the scam.
In typical Ponzi scheme form, Aman, through his three companies that were involved in the scam, misappropriated some $10 million of investors’ funds to turn around and directly pay previous investors in Aman’s three companies.
Fortunately for the greater good of society, United States District Court Judge Robin Rosenberg, who works in the Southern District of Florida, granted the SEC’s request to freeze the entirety of the assets of both Mr. Aman and Argyle Coin, LLC.
