The Department of Justice is planning to drop the charges against a Colorado man accused of running cryptocurrency fraud that allegedly netted him $722 million in ill-gotten gains.
Matthew Goettsche, along with several others, was indicted in 2019 over claims he defrauded investors with his crypto mining firm, BitClub Network. He rewarded investors for recruiting new members, prosecutors said, the classic structure of a Ponzi scheme.
In a sharp reversal, the deputy attorney general’s office in Washington ordered the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office to dismiss the case with prejudice, two people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg Law.
The first public sign that the prosecution was no longer being pursued came on Wednesday, when Goettsche’s attorneys filed a motion informing the judge they had “reached an agreement in principle to resolve the pending charges.”
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According to the people who spoke with Bloomberg Law, Goettsche assembled a team of lawyers who had connections to the Trump administration that could lobby for relief from the DOJ.
Fox News Digital reached out to the DOJ for comment.
Emily Covington, a DOJ spokesperson, denied that the decision to drop the charges had anything to with “any alleged pressure by Goettsche’s attorneys,” in a statement to Bloomberg Law.
She also said that the DOJ routinely evaluates pending cases and that the government is in the process of recovering “a substantial amount owed to investors.”
This marks a stunning shift since February, when prosecutors sent the court a letter saying that a jury trial was necessary.
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“The Indictment concerns a global fraudulent scheme based on false promises that the victims’ hundreds of millions of dollars in investments would be used to generate returns from cryptocurrency mining,” prosecutors wrote in the letter, which was signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
In 2015, when BitClub Network was just getting off the ground, Goettsche allegedly said to his co-conspirators, “We are building this whole model on the backs of idiots,” according to the indictment.
Bitcoin mining is a process that requires “miners” to use computers to solve complicated math problems in order to be rewarded with newly-minted bitcoin.
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BitClub Network, as others were doing at the time, purported to pool investors money together to buy hardware and computer chips to build a better mining system. The idea was to then distribute the profits.
Prosecutors argued that BitClub Network reported fake profits and misled their investors.
“Real stats on fake numbers,” Goettsche said in a January 2015 message to a colleague that was included in the indictment. “We will slowly introduce real numbers.”
The indictment, which charged Goettsche with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and selling unregistered securities, was returned during the first Trump administration, and three of Goettsche’s co-defendants pleaded guilty.
The second Trump administration has been much more friendly to crypto, with Donald Trump’s family having their own crypto ventures. The House of Representatives also passed the Clarity Act last year, the first attempt by Congress to provide an updated framework to regulate crypto.
Fox News Digital reached out to Goettsche’s defense attorneys for comment.
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