issued Last Friday, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued a statement asking British citizen Benjamin Reynolds to pay a fine of $571 million for a cryptocurrency fraud he committed throughout the summer and fall of 2017.

The bulk of the penalty is a $429 million fine, with an additional $142 million to be paid in compensation to his victims.

20,000 Bitcoin is the amount of money that British citizen “Benjamin Reynolds” stole, which is undoubtedly a lot of money.

Today, bitcoin is hovering around the $55,000 level, meaning that the value of the stolen bitcoin is worth more than $1 billion.

Back in early summer 2017, when Reynolds started the scam, the price of bitcoin was around $1,500, or just under one-sixth of its value today.

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Reynolds, allegedly from Manchester, northern England, targeted about 170 US citizens through a fake company called Control-Finance.

Using a website, several social media profiles and email communications, Reynolds was feeding them a false promise that he would trade their money in the online cryptocurrency markets and return their money with the amount of profits made.

Reynolds devised an innovative lie, telling the victims that he would hire professional cryptocurrency traders with guaranteed trading profits.

But he immediately disappeared with the digital loot and has not been found since, although the CFTC filed his case in January 2019.

Crypto: fertile ground for cyberattacks

With the advent of cryptocurrencies, new forms of theft have appeared intensely and rapidly

In February of this year, the decentralized finance platform CREAM was stolen with more than $37 million when hackers used a complex multi-step method involving fast loans.

Then in March, the contents of the hacked wallet was drained on the social platform Roll, from which more than 3,000 ETH, or about $5.7 million at the time, was stolen, driving down the price of many of the stolen digital tokens.

With the emergence of new forms of cybercrime, new forms of digital tournaments also come.

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Last year, a security expert nicknamed “samczsun” discovered a weak smart contract that left more than 25,000 ETH, or $9.6 million at the time, open, so he secured the contract and alerted its rightful owner, Lien Finance.

So the question remains:

Will Benjamin Reynolds feel the sting of guilt and pay the CFTC fine? Or he will ignore it and continue what he is doing.

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