A 64-year-old German national, Horst Jicha, was nabbed in South Florida just days before the holiday cheer of Christmas, embroiled in allegations swirling around a cryptocurrency scheme that smells less of festive spirit and more of investment deceit. The broad-day arrest brought into sharp focus the indictment which tore open late Tuesday, charging Jicha with a litany of offenses including conspiracy to defraud the United States and money laundering, detailed in the papers filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, which Local 10 has reported. The former CEO of "USI-Tech," a supposed UAE-based crypto venture, and Jicha, with residential ties to Brazil and Spain, stirred the Feds interest, but his activities in South Florida at the time of his arrest cast an ambiguous shadow.
It was Local 10 that illuminated the indictment’s claims against Jicha, implicating him for peddling false hopes of lucrative returns through a multilevel marketing gambit in the name of USI-Tech. The company pitched a "BTC package" promising 140% returns over 140 days with a mere 50-euro investment. According to Local 10, a classic bait for a Ponzi as labeled by CoinCentral, this too-good-to-be-true promise was aggressively hawked across the U.S. in 2017.
The tale takes a twist with Jicha at an event in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, reassuring investors that USI-Tech was playing by the book, not a scam and certainly not a Ponzi. "I spent 'hundreds of hours' and untold amounts of money to make sure that everything was 'legal' in the U.S.," Jicha claimed, as detailed by authorities alleged in the indictment dissected by cryptocurrencydt.com. But his reassurances conflicted with the later cascade of cease and desist orders raining down from U.S. states and Canadian provinces.
Despite the spiraling skepticism, Jicha's communication with investors became erratic post-shutdown, with promises fluttering in the wind. Prosecutors said that he propagated a "BTC 2.0 Package" which would supposedly repay investors, a commitment foundering in the cold reality that withdrawals were a mirage reported in Local 10. The indictment spells a chilling silence that followed, as investors found themselves ghosted, with a whopping $94 million worth of Bitcoin and Ether reportedly under Jicha's control.
