New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking a $1.37 billion penalty against the masterminds behind NovaTech alongside its predecessor AWS Mining, representing two connected digital asset investment frauds that supposedly swindled hundreds of thousands of participants globally out of upwards of $1 billion.
The suspected creators, Cynthia and Eddy Petion, failed to show up for court proceedings and, as stated by the attorney general’s department, escaped the nation.
“NovaTech and AWS Mining tricked numerous susceptible New Yorkers by convincing them they were placing funds into a secure vehicle while they were actually trapped in a Ponzi structure,” James expressed in an official release. “These fraudsters preyed upon immigrant and faith-based populations using the lure of enhanced financial futures, only to strip them of their accumulated wealth.”
These operations, starting with AWS Mining and moving on to NovaTech, depended on agents who aggressively pursued participants inside Haitian and additional immigrant populations through devotional circles, messaging application groups, and promotional content presented in Haitian Creole.
AWS Mining offered digital currency mining agreements guaranteeing monthly gains between 15 and 20 percent alongside a 200 percent yield over a 15-month span. That platform failed in 2019. Following that, the Petions introduced NovaTech, promoted as a licensed brokerage fund, guaranteeing weekly investment yields spanning two to four percent, which equates to over 140 percent annually.
Law enforcement officials state that those yields were entirely fraudulent. Data from B2Broker, the provider of NovaTech’s custom-branded exchange software, indicates that out of the sum exceeding $1 billion placed by participants from 2019 to 2023, a mere $26 million was deployed in actual trading activities, and NovaTech brokers managed to lose $18.2 million of that specific amount. Payouts distributed to earlier participants originated from incoming capital rather than market gains. When NovaTech failed in the middle of 2023, numerous participants found themselves unable to access their balances.
The attorney general additionally demands $134.5 million that the Petions reportedly transferred into personal addresses from the participant repository under the sole management of Cynthia Petion, in addition to $4.7 million connected to the prior AWS Mining project. A ruling by default issued in August 2025 currently prohibits the pair and their corporate entities from participating in securities, commodities, and digital asset markets.
In a separate development, four major representatives associated with the fraud agreed to surrender roughly $6 million for victim restitution and accepted identical market prohibitions.
Originally published at https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/ny-seeks-1-37-b-judgement-novatech.
