New York AG Seeks $1.37 Billion From NovaTech Founders Who Fled US

A $1.37 Billion Claim Filed in Manhattan

New York Attorney General Letitia James asked a state court on Thursday to order the founders of collapsed crypto trading platform NovaTech to pay about $1.37 billion, the largest recovery request yet tied to the fraud. The filing, lodged in New York County Supreme Court, names Cynthia and Eddy Petion, NovaTech itself and related companies, and seeks damages, disgorgement and interest on top of an August 2025 default judgment. That judgment was entered after the couple failed to answer the state's lawsuit and, per the attorney general's office, left the United States. It also barred them for life from the securities, commodities and crypto industries.

The request itemizes roughly $1.13 billion in disgorgement and $232 million in interest. James first sued NovaTech and AWS Mining in June 2024, alleging they defrauded investors of more than $1 billion, and the SEC charged the Petions and others two months later over what the federal agency described as a $650 million fraud. Alongside the filing, her office announced settlements totaling nearly $6 million with four of the scheme's top promoters, Martin Zizi, Frantz Ciceron, Ricardo Roy Sr. and James Corbett. Each agreed to pay money for the benefit of victims and accepted permanent industry bans. The Petions did not appear in the case, leaving the damages figure for the judge to decide on the state's papers, and collecting from a couple believed to be abroad may prove harder than winning the order. “These scammers targeted immigrant and religious communities with the promise of a better life but instead robbed them of their life savings,” James said in the statement announcing the settlements.

Where $1.16 Billion in Deposits Actually Went

Records from payment processor CoinPayments, cited in the affirmation filed with the court, show investors deposited roughly $1.16 billion in crypto into NovaTech's wallet between August 2019 and May 2023. Cynthia Petion was the only authorized user on the account, meaning she alone controlled the private keys moving customer funds. At least $134.5 million of that total went to wallets belonging to the Petions, according to the state.

Against those inflows, the platform passed just under $26 million to its trading provider between 2019 and 2023, and about $18.2 million of it was lost. Only a small fraction of the money investors were told was being traded ever reached a trading desk. The filing argues that weekly payouts and recruiting bonuses were funded with new deposits rather than trading gains, contradicting NovaTech's claim that investor returns came from successful crypto and foreign exchange trading. The company had presented itself as a registered hedge fund broker licensed to trade crypto in the U.S. and advertised weekly returns of 2% to 4%, or more than 140% a year. When it collapsed in 2023, tens of thousands of investors could no longer withdraw their money.

The scheme concentrated on immigrant communities, particularly Haitian New Yorkers, reaching them through prayer groups, social media and WhatsApp chats with advertising in Haitian Creole. More than 11,000 New Yorkers invested, out of hundreds of thousands of participants worldwide. Before NovaTech, the Petions were top U.S. promoters of AWS Mining, a program that promised 15% to 20% monthly returns from crypto mining before it collapsed in 2019. The filing states that Cynthia Petion admitted in a WhatsApp chat to making at least $3 million from that earlier operation.

The Arithmetic Behind the Claim

The numbers in the affirmation are what make the case: over $1.1 billion entered NovaTech through a single processor account, while under $26 million ever reached the trading operation investors were told would generate their returns. Our reading of the filing is that recovery of the full $1.37 billion from founders living abroad is far from assured, but the structure of the resolution still delivers something concrete: four promoters are paying nearly $6 million to victims and are out of the industry permanently. The case also demonstrates how regulators now reconstruct collapsed schemes from processor and wallet records rather than the operator's own trading claims, an evidentiary route other state and federal cases are likely to follow.