The New York attorney general’s latest filing against the people behind NovaTech and AWS Mining tells two very different stories. One is settled and measurable: four promoters have agreed to pay almost $6 million and leave the industry for good. The other is a number on paper that may never be collected, a $1.37 billion request aimed at two founders who have already fled the country.
Keeping those two sums apart is the quickest way to read the case. On October 22, 2026, Attorney General Letitia James asked the New York Supreme Court to order Cynthia and Eddy Petion to pay disgorgement, damages and interest totalling roughly $1.37 billion. On the same day, her office announced settlements with promoters Martin Zizi, Frantz Ciceron, Ricardo Roy Sr. and James Corbett, who together will pay about $5.98 million and accept permanent bans from the securities, commodities and cryptocurrency industries.
The arithmetic of a pyramid
According to the affirmation filed with the court, investors deposited about $1.16 billion into NovaTech between August 2019 and April 2023. Only about $26 million ever reached a trading platform, a little over two percent of every dollar collected. That ratio matters because it distinguishes a pyramid from a business that merely failed.
The filing states that every withdrawal from NovaTech’s wallets, including the advertised returns and recruitment bonuses, was paid out of other investors’ deposits. No trading profit funded any payout. A failed trading operation still trades something; NovaTech traded almost nothing and paid people anyway, the structural signature of a Ponzi scheme. For anyone evaluating a crypto yield product, the same test applies: what share of deposits actually produces revenue, and what share simply pays earlier participants? A platform that cannot answer that question with audited trading records deserves extra scrutiny.
Why the two numbers are so far apart
The $5.98 million in promoter settlements is disgorgement intended to return money to victims, not a fine paid to the state. The $1.37 billion is a default-judgment request. The founders never answered the 2024 lawsuit, and a court entered a default order finding them liable in August 2025, after they had left the country. A judgment on paper and money actually recovered are different things. The record is incomplete as well: the affirmation notes the defaulting defendants failed to turn over the investor records and full accounting the court ordered, leaving the state to reconstruct losses from fragments such as a single promoter’s list of 204 victims.
The scheme ran in two stages. AWS Mining sold mining contracts promising 15 to 20 percent monthly returns and 200 percent within 15 months before collapsing in 2019. NovaTech then marketed itself as a registered hedge fund broker, which it was not, with weekly returns of roughly two to four percent. More than 11,000 New Yorkers lost money, recruited through Haitian Creole advertisements, prayer groups and WhatsApp chats aimed at immigrant and religious communities.
What to watch next
The next observable step is the court’s ruling on the inquest. If the full request is granted, the Petions will owe $1.37 billion on paper. Whether any of it can be recovered depends on locating assets and enforcing a judgment against people who have produced no records and no appearance. That is the part of the case the filing does not, and cannot, answer.
Adapted from NY AG Seeks $1.37 Billion From NovaTech Founders as Promoters Settle for Nearly $6 Million.