The former boyfriend of fugitive “Cryptoqueen” Ruja Ignatova, who is accused of orchestrating the global Ponzi scheme tied to OneCoin, was sentenced to five years in prison for laundering $300 million in proceeds of the fraud.
Gilbert Armenta, 59, pleaded guilty in 2018 to conspiring to commit wire fraud, money laundering and extortion in connection with OneCoin, a $4 billion multilevel marketing scam based on a phony cryptocurrency. Armenta cooperated with prosecutors for two years in unwinding the fraud, but then committed new crimes, prompting the government to seek a longer sentence.
Armenta “provided extraordinary cooperation to the government, then ...