New York Seeks $1.37 Billion Judgment From NovaTech Founders

New York Attorney General Letitia James's office asked a state court on Thursday to order NovaTech founders Cynthia and Eddy Petion and their companies to pay $1.37 billion over the collapse of the crypto and forex trading platform, according to a court filing and the attorney general's announcement the same day.

The request is broken into two pieces. The affirmation signed by Senior Enforcement Counsel Tanya Trakht on Oct. 21 and filed in New York County Supreme Court under index number 451633/2024 seeks $1,134,549,691 in disgorgement plus $232,473,894 in pre-judgment interest, for a NovaTech total of $1,367,023,585. The attorney general's release describes the same demand as $1.3 billion in damages and disgorgement. The court has not ruled on it.

The disgorgement number is the money the state says reached NovaTech minus what the company sent to its broker. The filing runs the subtraction in the open: $1,160,544,294 in investor deposits less $25,994,603 placed with B2Broker for trading, leaving $1,134,549,691, plus interest at the statutory rate.

James cast the case in the terms her office has used since filing it in 2024. "These scammers targeted immigrant and religious communities with the promise of a better life but instead robbed them of their life savings," she said in the release, adding that her office "will always stand up for New Yorkers who have been targeted by these merciless scams."

Liability was settled long before this week. The court entered a default order and judgment against the Petions and the companies on Aug. 4, 2025, after they failed to respond to the lawsuit and fled the country, the release states. That judgment ordered the couple to hand over investor records and a full accounting, and Unchained reported that the filing says neither was produced.

The other half of Thursday's announcement concerns people who recruited investors. Four promoters agreed to pay a combined $5,975,861 for the benefit of victims: Martin Zizi $2.9 million, Frantz Ciceron $2.05 million, James Corbett $750,000 and Ricardo Roy Sr. $275,861. All four are permanently barred from the securities, commodities and cryptocurrency industries, the attorney general's office said. Unchained reported that the settlements were reached between June 2024 and Oct. 20, 2026, with some payments in installments running to 2030.

James sued NovaTechFx and the Australian mining company AWS Mining Pty Ltd. in June 2024, alleging that promoters worked through prayer groups, social media and WhatsApp chats to reach immigrant communities, particularly Haitian New Yorkers. More than 11,000 New Yorkers invested in the two schemes and lost tens of millions of dollars, the release states. AWS Mining promised investors 15 to 20 percent monthly returns and 200 percent within 15 months before it collapsed in 2019.

NovaTech took in money from August 2019 onward. Records from the payment processor CoinPayments show $1,160,544,294 in investor cryptocurrency reached NovaTech's wallet between Aug. 15, 2019 and May 23, 2023, the filing states. Of that, $25,994,603 went to the broker B2Broker for trading between August 2019 and April 2023, and NovaTech's traders lost $18,189,417 of it. The attorney general's release says less than $26 million was ever traded on the platform and that NovaTech advertised profits of about two to four percent per week. The release also states that the company falsely presented itself as a registered hedge fund broker, misrepresented that it was licensed to trade cryptocurrency in the United States, paid bonuses for recruiting new investors and told investors they could withdraw their funds and profits at any time. When NovaTech collapsed in May 2023, tens of thousands of investors could not get their cryptocurrency out.

Cynthia Petion, described in the filing as the sole authorized user on the account, approved at least $134,518,775 in withdrawals from the CoinPayments wallet into wallets held by her and Eddy Petion. The filing calls NovaTech a Ponzi scheme, with weekly returns paid out of later investors' deposits rather than trading gains.

What the state can actually collect remains open. Neither the filing nor the release describes an asset freeze, a receiver or any other mechanism for recovering money from the Petions, Unchained noted. The motion separately seeks about $6.15 million, including interest, over AWS Mining, Cointelegraph reported, adding that its reporters asked the attorney general's office how recovered funds would be distributed to victims and had received no response by publication. In a parallel federal case, the SEC obtained a clerk's default against the couple and NovaTech in March 2026.