The alleged founders of the operation, Cynthia and Eddy Petion, notably failed to appear in court to answer the mounting allegations against them. According to the New York Attorney General’s office, the couple has since fled the country, leaving behind a trail of financial devastation and a litany of regulatory and legal actions.
"NovaTech and AWS Mining scammed thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers by telling them they were making a safe investment when in reality, they were victims of a pyramid scheme," Attorney General Letitia James said in a public statement detailing the enforcement action. "These scammers targeted immigrant and religious communities with the promise of a better life but instead robbed them of their life savings."
The fraudulent operations, which began with AWS Mining and later morphed into NovaTech, relied heavily on an extensive network of enthusiastic promoters. These individuals infiltrated and recruited heavily within tight-knit populations, specifically targeting Haitian and other immigrant communities. The recruitment tactics were deeply personal and manipulative, leveraging trusted spaces such as local prayer groups, dedicated WhatsApp chat groups, and targeted advertisements published in Haitian Creole to lower the guard of prospective victims.
The mechanics of the fraud evolved over several years, adapting its pitch to capture fresh capital. Initially, AWS Mining operated by selling cryptocurrency mining contracts that dangled astronomical, unsustainable promises of 15 to 20 percent monthly returns, alongside a staggering 200 percent return within a 15-month window. Unsurprisingly, this unsustainable financial model collapsed under its own weight in 2019.
Rather than facing accountability, the Petions immediately pivoted and launched NovaTech. This successor scheme was aggressively marketed as a fully registered hedge fund broker. The platform enticed new investors by promising weekly trading returns ranging from two to four percent, which compounded to more than 140 percent on an annual basis.
However, prosecutors and financial records reveal that these promised returns were entirely fabricated. Detailed records obtained from B2Broker, the firm that supplied NovaTech’s white-label trading platform, paint a grim picture of the enterprise’s inner workings. Out of the more than $1 billion in hard-earned cash that investors deposited into the platform between 2019 and 2023, only about $26 million was ever actually deployed into real trading markets. Compounding the deception, NovaTech’s active traders managed to lose $18.2 million of that meager allocated amount.
In classic Ponzi scheme fashion, any returns distributed to earlier investors did not come from legitimate trading profits, but rather directly from the pool of newer deposits brought in by unsuspecting recruits. When the house of cards finally collapsed in mid-2023, tens of thousands of international investors found themselves entirely locked out of their accounts, unable to withdraw a single cent of their remaining funds.
Beyond the overarching $1.37 billion judgment, the New York Attorney General’s office is specifically pursuing an additional $134.5 million that the Petions allegedly siphoned directly from investor accounts into their own personal digital wallets. This specific pool of funds was funneled through an account over which Cynthia Petion maintained sole control. Furthermore, prosecutors are tracking an additional $4.7 million directly tied to the earlier AWS Mining iteration of the fraud.
The legal net has been tightening around the perpetrators for some time. A default judgment entered by the court in August 2025 formally barred the couple and their corporate entities from ever participating in the securities, commodities, and cryptocurrency industries again.
As the broader legal fallout continues to unfold, accountability is also catching up to those who helped spread the fraudulent gospel. Separately from the primary action against the founders, four of the scheme’s top promoters have reached agreements with regulators. They have agreed to pay nearly $6 million in total disgorgement directly back to victims, while also accepting permanent industry bans that bar them from the securities, commodities, and cryptocurrency markets.
