NEW YORK - A fake cryptocurrency promoter who was arrested in Thailand in 2018 has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for fraud by a US federal court.
Sebastian Greenwood, a dual citizen of Sweden and the United Kingdom, operated the OneCoin scheme that defrauded some 3.5 million people out of US$4 billion, prosecutors said.
US District Judge Edgardo Ramos in Manhattan sentenced Greenwood, who pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges in December 2022. He also ordered Greenwood to forfeit $300 million.
Greenwood had been detained in New York since his 2018 arrest at his home on Koh Samui and extradition to the United States over his role in promoting OneCoin, which attracted a number of unwary investors in Thailand as well as numerous other countries.
The Anti-Money Laundering Office in Thailand seized a number of assets from Greenwood following his arrest in 2018, including 3.3 kilogrammes of gold bullion.
Prosecutors had sought a sentence of at least 30 years for Greenwood, who they said was OneCoin’s “primary promoter” who touted it as the next Bitcoin. In reality, OneCoin was nothing more than a pyramid scheme, they said.
Greenwood founded OneCoin in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2014 alongside Ruja Ignatova, a German citizen who prosecutors say is also known as the Cryptoqueen. The FBI named her to its ten most-wanted list last year.
Ignatova remains at large.
The sentence comes as prosecutors in Manhattan gear up for the trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges stemming from the November 2022 collapse of his now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange.