Guilty As Charged!

Hello Delta Squad!

Here we are, two months away from the end of the year… Can you believe 2023 is almost over? We’ve kicked off November on a good note at BitDelta with our #HalloweenCampaign ????

Some lucky customers had the chance to win up to 2000 USDT prize pool.?

But not to fret for those who didn't get to participate as Thanksgiving is right around the corner, which means… many more opportunities are on the way.

In the meantime, as it’s (finally) Friday, we are back with this week’s top stories! From crypto to #AI stories, it certainly has been an interesting week.

• Oyster Protocol in hot mess as founder gets four years prison sentence for $5.5 million in tax offences.

• SafeMoon is in trouble with its executive team getting charged with multiple counts of fraud and $200 million theft.

• Crypto whistleblowers earn big this year as CFTC pays $16million for crypto tips.

• The FTX court saga draws to an end as SBF is found guilty on all seven charges in the FTX fraud trial.

Before expanding on all of that, let's check out the market weather at BitDelta Exchange ??

Quote of the Week ???

“Whenever cryptocurrency prices rally, people start spending a lot more”.

– Erik Voorhees

Do you have any quotes you like? Share it with us in the comments below!

Oyster Protocol in Hot Mess?

Amir Bruno Elmaani, CEO of Oyster Protocol (also known as “Bruno Block”), recently just got a prison sentence of four years for tax evasion worth $ 5.5 million.?

On the 31st of October, The US Attorney’s Office stated that the 31-year-old founder was sentenced to prison following his April 6 guilty plea, where he confessed to secretly minting and selling Pearl tokens while evading income tax as profits came in from the project.

Bruno confessed to owing taxes of over $5.5 million. Alongside his four-year prison sentence, he was sentenced to one year of supervised release and was ordered to pay $5.5 million in restitution.

A little backstory: In 2017, between September and October, Bruno promoted the official token of Oyster protocol, which is known as Pearl (PRL).?

Pearl was promoted as a token for investors to purchase data on the Oyster protocol, a blockchain-based data storage. However, unknown to Oyster Protocol’s team and investors, Bruno had been minting a mass of new PRL tokens secretly while dumping these tokens on the market for his gain in October 2018.

Despite his scheme, Bruno filed a tax return in 2017 where he claimed to earn only $15,000 from a patent design business and reported zero income to the tax authorities in 2018.

However, upon investigations, the court found out that Bruno spent over $10 million on multiple yachts, $1.6 million at a carbon-fibre composite company, hundreds of thousands of dollars at home improvement stores and more than $700,000 to purchase two homes in 2018. Bruno also used friends and family as nominees to receive cryptocurrency proceeds and transfer them or U.S. currency to his accounts.

SafeMoon Execs. Charged for Fraud?

This week, The United States Securities and Exchange Commission announced that? SafeMoon, a crypto exchange, and three executives were found guilty of fraud and unregistered securities sales concerning its SAFEMOON token.?

According to the allegations made by the SEC,? SafeMoon founders - Kyle Nagy, John Karony, and CTO Thomas Smith - withdrew assets worth $200 million from the project and misappropriated investor funds.

• The Justice Department charged the founders with conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy.

• The SEC also revealed that the SafeMoon promised funds marketed to be locked in the liquidity pool and not accessible to anyone, even the defendants, were not locked.

• According to the SEC, Karony and Smith misappropriated funds to make SafeMoon purchases to prop up its price. Karony is also accused of wash trading.

SafeMoon has already been a victim of controversy before. In February 2022, SafeMoon, Karony and several celebrities were sued, alleging they had carried out a pump-and-dump scheme with the token. SafeMoon was hacked back in March 2023, but the hacker eventually agreed to return 80% of the fund the following month.

$16 Million for Crypto Tips ??

It was revealed that earlier this year, the United States commodities regulator had paid $16 million to whistleblowers who gave information leading to successful enforcement actions, with most of the tips involving crypto.

According to the statement released by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero,? the tips received this year involved crypto, which she claimed was “an area that continues to have pervasive fraud and other illegality.”

Additionally, it was revealed that two whistleblowers received $15 million alone for their information, which led the CFTC to successful enforcement cases in September - but the regulator didn’t delve into the nature of those cases at the time.

Christy said whistleblowers are vital to mitigating commodities fraud and that the CFTC wouldn’t be able to “fully protect” customers and markets without them.?

• It is essential to know that the CFTC has budgeted over $350 million since its program began in 2014.?

• The? CFTC has led to over $3 billion in enforcement sanctions ordered in cases tipped off by whistleblowers.?

• The CFTC also won a record $3.4-billion penalty payment in a Bitcoin-related fraud case in April, alongside its case against Digitex CEO Adam Todd in July, who was charged to pay $16 million in penalties.

Everything Must Come to an End?

At last…? the defamed FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has been found and proven guilty of all seven charges by the jury in his criminal trial in New York after about four hours of deliberations.

SBF was found guilty of two counts of wire fraud, two counts of wire fraud conspiracy, one count of securities fraud, one count of commodities fraud conspiracy and one count of money laundering scheme.?

After a trial that has been dragging for quite some time now, keeping everyone on their toes, Bankman-Fried will be returning to court for sentencing on March 28, 2024.?

According to the judge, SBF's crimes each carry a maximum sentence of between 5 and 20 years in prison, with the wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering scheme having a maximum 20-year sentence each.

The New York Southern District U.S. Attorney Damian Williams also called Bankman-Fried’s crimes “a multibillion-dollar scheme designed to make him the king of crypto" and one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.

However, Bankman-Fried’s attorney stated that despite respecting the jury’s decision, they were disappointed with the final verdict, and insisted that SBF’s innocence is a battle far from being over.??

It's also important to note that other critical executives at now-defunct FTX, like Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang and? Nishad Singh have all pleaded guilty to various charges, and worked with the government to testify against Bankman-Fried during the five-week trial.

Bankman-Fried had pleaded not guilty to all charges. During his trial, he took the stand to maintain his innocence, denied any wrongdoing in FTX’s relationship with Alameda and attempted to distance himself from key decisions.

During the trial, Sam accused Gary Wang, his co-founder, of creating a function that allowed Alameda to trade funds on FTX that it didn’t have. He also accused Caroline of not focusing on risk management and didn’t believe he defrauded FTX customers by taking over $8 billion worth of their funds; instead, he saw it as Alameda borrowing from the exchange.

Neverending Crypto News?

• SlashNext reveals that email phishing attacks increased by 1,265% post-ChatGPT launch.

• Bitcoin mining firm Northern Data secures $610 million in debt financing from Tether.

• Satoshi Nakamoto's legacy continues as Bitcoin Whitepaper turns 15 years old.

• SEC is in talks with PayPal over PYUSD stablecoin amidst? PayPal securing a Crypto licence in the UK.

BitDelta in Full Action!?

• Exciting news for us at BitDelta as our complete guide on the BitDelta exchange is now live on CoinGecko ?? You can check it out here.

• This week, our Indian team attended the #IFTA2023 event. The India FinTech Forum, in partnership with the India Blockchain Forum, brought lots of insights and reflections into the future of finance and Web3.?

That's it from us, folks.

We'll see you again next week for an even more exciting roundup of crypto and blockchain news across the web3 space!