New York's attorney general wants $1.37 billion back — and the two people she's chasing have already left the country. Cynthia and Eddy Petion built NovaTech into one of the biggest crypto Ponzi schemes on record, then skipped town before facing a judge.
The pitch was simple, and that's exactly what should have raised flags. Between 2019 and 2023, NovaTech promised investors 2% to 3% weekly returns from forex and crypto trading, profits "from day one," and — supposedly — not a single losing week. Real trading doesn't work that way. Through the payment processor CoinPayments, the company pulled in $1.16 billion, yet only about $26 million of that ever reached an actual trading platform, B2Broker, where traders proceeded to lose roughly $18 million anyway. The rest funded payouts to earlier investors and referral bonuses for recruiters — a textbook pyramid. Cynthia Petion personally moved at least $134.5 million into her own wallets, prosecutors say.
NovaTech leaned hard on Haitian immigrant communities, advertising in Creole-language WhatsApp groups and recruiting through prayer meetings, trading on trust built inside tight religious networks. More than 11,000 New Yorkers and hundreds of thousands of people worldwide put money in, many of them far from wealthy.
New York filed suit in June 2024. The Petions never showed up, and a default judgment landed against them in August 2025. Now the AG is asking the court to confirm $1.13 billion in disgorgement plus $232.5 million in interest. Four promoters already settled for roughly $6 million combined and are permanently barred from the securities, commodities, and crypto industries. The SEC separately sued the same couple in a related $650 million federal case.
Whether New York ever collects is another matter — the founders are gone, and a judgment on paper isn't the same as money in the bank.
