The CFTC filed its massive $3.4 billion civil suit last year against Cornelius Johannes Steynberg, AKA Joe Steyn, listed as a South African Man who at the time of the suit being filed operated in Brazil along withthat Steynberg operated an online currency commodity pool for three years from 2018 through 2021. Users had to pay bitcoin to access the pools found on sites like “MTImembers”and “myMTIclub.” The CFTC said he got people to invest 29,421 bitcoin, which in total valued $1.
told pool participants his company used a bot to make successful trades using their funds, though all that was a lie, and any account statements offered to participants were all just fakes created by demo accounts on an off-site trading platform. Steynberg’s broker platform which he called Trade300 didn’t even exist, and he used word of mouth and other forceful ad campaigns to get more people involved, hence the charge of it being a multi-level marketing scheme.
“Defendants never traded profitably, never earned any profits trading, and misappropriated essentially all of the at least 29,421 bitcoin they accepted from participants,” the agency alleged in its lawsuit.