close button
sign up
getting started
lab characters

3 steps are all you need to instantly bring the top online punt casino into your reach. Don't lose any more time when you could be winning the biggest international jackpots on over 200 online casino games. US players are welcome at our online casino!

Register a Player Account?

Play for Money Get full access to all games, exceptional support, services, bonuses and cash money jackpots.

Play for Fun, Try all our games for free and get comfortable with the on-screen navigation before depositing.

Making a Deposit

After registering a player account, visit the Cashier to make a secure deposit using the cryptocurrency of your choice and start playing to win Real Money riches.

Begin Playing

Once you have registered and made a deposit, play to win on more than 200 online casino games, each with their own unique symbols, bonus rounds and jackpots.

Sam Bankman-Fried facing criminal charges in court.

Will Sam Bankman-Fried Go To Jail?

February 8, 2023

Will Sam Bankman-Fried Go To Jail?

February 8, 2023

Blog » Posts tagged "Scam"

Sam Bankman-Fried Jail Saga: Will SBF Go to Jail?

The collapse of the FTX empire in November 2022 was shocking both in its speed and scale, and now, a Sam Bankman-Fried jail sentence may be looming. On the surface, it appeared to be a well-run cryptocurrency exchange that offered a range of attractive services and barely any downtime. 

However, as we now know, under the surface it was at best a disorganized mess and at worst, a criminal enterprise. 

Former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is now famous across the world as the face of the collapse and has had multiple criminal charges leveled at him from various U.S. regulators and law enforcement agencies. The question is, however, is a SBF jail sentence inevitable, or, as with another famous face who presided over a crypto exchange collapse, could he escape?

 

The Ghost of MtGox

When MtGox collapsed in February 2014, many instinctively thought that CEO Mark Karpeles was behind the loss of 745,000 bitcoins from the exchange. 

When evidence emerged that someone had been using a trading bot to buy up hundreds of thousands of bitcoins in MtGox’s last days and that the accounts using those bots could only have been accessed by Karpeles, the writing was on the wall.

When MtGox collapsed in February 2014, many instinctively thought that CEO Mark Karpeles was behind the loss of 745,000 bitcoins from the exchange.

Karpeles was arrested in July 2015 and went on trial two years later for the use of trading bots. He was found guilty, but the judge believed Karpeles’ story that he was doing it to try and repair a hole in the company books and that he never stole the bitcoins. 

Karpeles’ claims were backed up by convincing evidence not available at the time of his arrest, and he escaped with a four-year suspended sentence, much to everyone’s surprise, beating Japan’s 99% conviction rate.

A similar situation appears to be happening with the Sam Bankman-Fried jail sentence, albeit on a much more serious level. 

 

Sam Bankman-Fried jail sentence and criminal charges

On December 12, 2022, Bankman-Fried was hit with eight charges by U.S. federal authorities:

  • Securities fraud (multiple cases).
  • Wire fraud (multiple cases).
  • Money laundering.
  • Conspiracy to avoid campaign finance regulations.
  • Conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
  • Conspiracy to commit securities fraud.

Sam Bankman-Fried jail time might be a possibility as he was recently arrested for multiple criminal charges.

He was also hit with multiple other charges by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, but these would only result in financial penalties rather than putting Sam Bankman-Fried in jail.

 

Bankman-Fried’s Alleged Criminal Behavior

Bankman-Fried’s charge sheet is 13 pages long, so we won’t go into much detail on the alleged offenses. But what we can say, is that it all makes for a heady cocktail of financial skulduggery that would make even a mafia godfather wince. 

In short, Bankman-Fried is said to have masterminded an operation designed entirely to enrich himself and his closest associates, chiefly by swapping funds at will between his various entities and giving his companies an unfair advantage over its customers, whose money he was taking as he exacted this advantage.

Even without the benefit of seeing the evidence, the odds seem stacked against Bankman-Fried from the outset. Each one of the eight charges against him might see SBF jail-birding with a prison sentence of multiple years. 

If he were to be found guilty on all accounts, he could, theoretically, be looking at hundreds of years in prison.

Sma Bankman-Fried jail image.

We don’t yet know what argument his counsel is going to put forward in his defense, but it is going to have to be spectacular to get him off all the charges.

 

A Plea Deal Won’t Save Him

What is more likely is that the litany of charges has been put against him in the hopes that he cooperates as part of a plea deal. This would see the lesser charges get dropped if he agrees to help in the ongoing cases against Caroline Ellison (Alameda Research CEO) and Gary Wang (FTX co-founder). 

The problem for Bankman-Fried is that he has already pleaded not guilty to all charges, whereas Ellison and Wang have taken the deals offered to them. This means that they are already opening up on everything they had to do with Bankman-Fried and FTX.

High-ranking individuals at FTX facing criminal charges.

Of course, we don’t know the full scale of the evidence that federal prosecutors will use to put Sam Bankman-Fried in jail – the collection of which is going on right now. However, we have some great insight from John Ray III, who commented on what he found at FTX in the days after he took over:

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. 

From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”

Ray also revealed that high-ranking individuals at FTX had taken steps to “conceal the misuse of customer funds” and also referenced the “secret exemption of Alameda from certain aspects of FTX.com’s auto-liquidation protocol”, which meant that Alameda could not get liquidated if its trades went south when regular customers did. 

Small nuggets like this give us an insight into where the activity at FTX crossed the line from mismanagement to illicit activity.

 

Writing on the Wall for Bankman-Fried

Excerpts like those from Ray allow us to see this case in a different light to MtGox. Karpeles may have (and did) make some bad decisions during his tenure, and he was terrible at communication, but from what we know since its collapse, there was much more nefarious activity going on at FTX.

Of course, everyone should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but the sheer weight and severity of the crimes leveled at Bankman-Fried mean that, even if he changes his plea to guilty, a Sam Bankman-Fried jail sentence may still be imminent and he will almost certainly face decades in prison. 

For example, just one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud carries a maximum of 20 years in prison, and he is facing much more serious crimes than that.

The only way that SBF can avoid jail is by winning on every single charge or hoping the government’s case falls apart completely in the interim. While not impossible, the odds of either of these are remote, and it is much more likely that Sam Bankman-Fried’s jail sentence may see him spending the bulk of his adult life behind bars.

Casino games catalog at Punt Casino.

What is OneCoin? Who is Ruja-Ignatova? Punt is here to explain all.

What is OneCoin? Who is Ruja Ignatova?

August 31, 2022

What is OneCoin? Who is Ruja Ignatova?

August 31, 2022

Blog » Posts tagged "Scam"

OneCoin remains to this day one of the biggest crypto scams ever

Over the course of six years, Dr Ruja Ignatova presided over a scam that raked in some $4 billion before famously absconding and going into hiding. Around 3.5 million people are said to have been hoodwinked by Dr. Ignatova and her bold claims of a digital utopia, leaving them out of pocket and her on the run from authorities across the world, and possibly the Russian mafia.

There is now even a Ruja Ignatova FBI most wanted slot allocated to the OneCoin mistress, illustrating just how seriously her actions have been taken.

But what exactly was the OneCoin scam, how did it scam so many people, and what caused its downfall? Let’s find out.

OneCoin head Ruja Ignatova is the often dubbed "Crypto Queen" - and no, that's not a compliment.

 

Digital Utopia

OneCoin was founded in 2014 and promoted as a kind of digital utopia. Early supporters were fed stories of global adoption and a world in which OneCoin would be the next Bitcoin, the currency of choice for the digital age.

It was marketed in the same way as a pyramid or social marketing scheme. People attended glitzy conferences where they were shown what they could achieve if they signed up to be a OneCoin holder, or better a distributor. Being a distributor involved selling packages to others and taking a slice of the cost.

OneCoin was going to be so popular and so ubiquitous that early adopters, like Bitcoin OGs, were going to make themselves millionaires.

The problem was that it was a completely empty promise. There was no blockchain, nothing on which this whole digital nirvana could operate, and yet OneCoin became extremely popular based on the dream of financial freedom alone.

Promoters sold membership packages that supposedly contained OneCoin tokens alongside the ability to mine more, although with no actual blockchain in place the coins never arrived with buyers.

It was possible to sell the OneCoin token on the private exchange Xcoinx, but holders could only sell a limited amount, determined by the membership package they had bought. This allowed unrestricted funds to flow in and the amount of funds going out to be carefully controlled, meaning the Ponzi scheme could grow.

OneCoin was driven by flashy marketing, including huge over-produced events.

 

Us Against Them

In the same way as a cult operates, OneCoin promoters cultivated an ‘us against them’ mentality within the project.

Anyone who called OneCoin a scam or a Ponzi scheme was an agent of the authorities, who were desperate to shut down the anti-capitalist movement because it threatened their hegemony. This plan worked, and many people became brainwashed into the idea that the OneCoin scam was the only route to financial freedom.

However, by 2016 the wheels were starting to come off. That October, a blockchain technician was approached with a request to build a blockchain for OneCoin, but he refused, asking how the cryptocurrency could have been operating for two years without one.

Unlike many other millions, he smelt a rat and stayed away, although his story got out and he began to engage with OneCoin investors to explain why it was a scam.

By this point, the Xcoinx exchange had been taken offline, meaning OneCoin token holders and new buyers had no way of selling their coins. Behind the scenes, the need for this was obvious – the amount of people now sucking from the OneCoin teat was growing, with the top dogs frittering away the money coming in on their lavish lifestyles.

There was even a story of a Hong Kong hotel room filled with cash, which those in the know would take from whenever they wanted. No one was keeping track of how much money was coming in and going out – or if they were, they weren’t doing a good job of it.

The money that wasn’t being spent was being funneled into offshore bank accounts through a complex series of shell companies, ensuring that Dr. Ignatova and her accomplices had some put aside for a rainy day.

OneCoin saw its Sofia office raided by Bulgarian authorities.

 

Dr. Ignatova Goes Underground

That rainy day came sooner than Dr. Ignatova probably imagined.

Early supporters were starting to realize that they were never getting their money back and that the whole thing was nothing but a huge scam, especially when the long promised exchange failed to materialize.

Some had put their concerns to the authorities in their countries, and in April 2017 Indian police apprehended a number of OneCoin promoters based on complaints from victims.

Dr. Ignatova was due to address all these concerns at a gathering of European OneCoin promoters in Lisbon, Portugal, in October 2017. However, to everyone’s surprise, including the organizers, she didn’t show. And she continued to not show for days afterwards. No one could get hold of her.

Two weeks after her Lisbon no-show, Dr. Ignatova boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia, home of the OneCoin head office, to Athens, and then went underground. To date, this is the last time anyone has seen or heard from Dr. Ignatova.

 

The OneCoin Wheels Fall Off

Amazingly, despite her disappearance, the OneCoin scam rumbled on. Promoters continued to deny anything was wrong, and hit out at the various charges that began to come the way of those occupying top spots in the scam.

However, as these charges became more and more publicized and the world cottoned on to the scale of the swindle, income began to die. Having peaked at over 800 million euros during Q3 of 2016, income began to reverse massively, with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokens locked on the platform.

In 2018, the problems really began. Bulgarian police raided the OneCoin headquarters in Sofia, taking away servers and paperwork. This led in November that year to co-founder Sebastian Greenwood being arrested in Thailand and extradited to the U.S. to face charges of wire and securities fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering, and securities fraud.

Four months later, Dr. Ignatova’s brother, Konstantin, who also worked for OneCoin, was arrested at Los Angeles International airport awaiting a flight back to Bulgaria on similar charges.

OneCoin’s lawyer, Mark Scott, was indicted by a grand jury on wire fraud and money laundering counts around the same time, while US authorities charged Dr. Ignatova herself in absentia for wire fraud, security fraud and money laundering.

Ruja Ignatova is now one of the FBI's most wanted criminals.

In September 2019, the BBC podcast series The Missing Cryptoqueen aired and took the world by storm, increasing the pressure on Dr. Ignatova and the OneCoin project.

Admissions of Guilt

Despite these arrests, people, amazingly, continued to invest in the OneCoin scam, albeit on a vastly reduced scale, while OneCoin’s social media pushed with the anti-authority line, saying the arrests proved their theory.

The roof finally came in when Konstantin Ignatov testified during the Mark Scott trial in November 2019 that the whole operation was a “fraud scheme” and that “the money came from a criminal activity”.

Konstantin admitted that all the money raised from package sales had one purpose – to supplement Dr. Ingantova’s lifestyle. Investors’ money was funneled into bank accounts, property, luxury cars, yachts, and more, which she used alongside Greenwood, with whom she was having a relationship.

OneCoin’s head office in Sofia was thought to have shut down in late 2019, but it is still listed as ‘open’ online, with opening hours of 9am to 6pm. The OneCoin Twitter account is still active, although its last post was in July 2018 about robot waiters.

To all intents and purposes, OneCoin is a zombie – essentially dead, but not actually in the ground.

 

OneCoin is the biggest scam in crypto history and a lesson the space should learn from.

Where is Ruja Ignatova in 2022?

The last question that remains therefore is the big one – where is Ruja Ignatova? The answer is, obviously, not an easy one to wanser.

Dr. Ignatova has organizational ties to Sofia, home of the OneCoin head office, but that would be too obvious. There are other options; OneCoin is registered in Dubai and Dr. Ignatova has strong familial ties to Frankfurt and Schramberg in Germany.

Of course, she could also have bought a private island through a third party and be living in splendid isolation. With suggestions that the OneCoin scam involved the Russian mafia and with her face now plastered round the world, however, not least through her Ruja Ignatova FBI most wanted poster, one thing is sure – Dr. Ruja Ignatova will be on the run for the rest of her life… or at least until the money runs out.

Is the next crypto bull market close? Here is what to watch out for.

What Will Trigger the Next Crypto Bull Market?

September 6, 2022