New York AG seeks $1.3 billion from NovaTech founders after default judgment
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New York Attorney General Letitia James asked a court to make NovaTech founders Cynthia and Eddy Petion pay about $1.37 billion after an August 2025 default judgment in the case. The office also said it had already collected nearly $6 million from four promoters tied to NovaTech and AWS Mining, while the Petions had left the United States in mid-2022.
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What it means
NovaTech and its mining arm AWS Mining ran a multi-level crypto investment scheme that promised fixed daily returns, the same playbook that sank Ponzi operations like BitConnect in 2018. New York's Martin Act gives the attorney general broad civil-fraud powers without needing to prove intent, the tool James has used before against crypto lenders such as Celsius. The founders stopped responding to the case, and the court entered a default judgment against them in August 2025.
Victims who put money into NovaTech now depend on a civil money judgment against defendants who are no longer in the country, not on a criminal sentence that guarantees restitution. The nearly $6 million already collected from four promoters shows the AG can reach people still inside US jurisdiction, while the much larger sum targets assets the founders may have moved abroad. Investors gain a legal claim; they do not yet gain cash, and enforcement abroad could take years.
A civil judgment this large exposes the limits of US regulators once the people behind a fraud leave the country: a court can order $1.3 billion paid, but collecting it depends on foreign banks, asset-freeze orders and cooperation New York cannot compel on its own. NovaTech took in $1.16 billion and traded only a fraction of it, which means most victim funds were likely never invested at all but redirected, leaving little to recover regardless of the judgment's size.
The next marker is whether New York can convert the $1.3 billion default judgment into actual seized assets, through international asset-tracing or extradition requests tied to the founders' known location outside the US. Further settlements with remaining promoters, following the pattern of the nearly $6 million already secured from four of them, will show whether James's office can squeeze money out of the scheme's smaller participants even as the founders themselves stay out of reach. (per cryptobriefing.com)
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