A former Seventh-day Adventist Church deacon who was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2023 for scamming more than 25,000 mostly investors out of nearly $250 million in a cryptocurrency scam has been ordered to pay almost all of it back.
U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni found Eddy Alexandre liable for restitution and ordered him to pay back more than $228 million, the Christian Post reports.
Alexandre, 53, was a deacon at Maranatha French Speaking Seventh-day Adventist Church in Jamaica, Queens. He founded what is now the inactive crypto platform EminiFX and accessed his victims, who are Haitian immigrants, through the Haitian Adventist Church network. According to court documents Premiere Network obtained, Alexandre was charged with one count of commodities fraud and one count of wire fraud.
From September 2021 through May 2022, court documents state “in the course of soliciting investments in a cryptocurrency and FOREX investment platform, [Alexandre] made false and misleading statements to current and prospective investors about, among other things, the manner in which he invested their funds and the performance of their investments.”
According to the United States Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, Alexandre promised investors at least a 5% weekly return on their investment using fake artificial-intelligence trading technology.
“Instead of using investors’ funds as he had promised, ALEXANDRE also misdirected at least approximately $14,700,000 to his personal bank account,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office writes. “For example, ALEXANDRE used $155,000 in investor funds to purchase a BMW car for himself and spent an additional $13,000 of investor funds on car payments, including to Mercedes-Benz.”
He also reportedly used the money on a $4.8 million Long Island home, acquired nearly 50 foreclosed properties, leased six cars, and sent $15 million into his personal bank account.
In addition to his nine-year sentence, he was sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay forfeiture of $248,829,276.73 and pay restitution in the amount of $213,639,133.53.