A US federal judge has ordered Debiex to return around $2.26 million to its customers, which the platform allegedly stole in romance scams. This includes an additional civil penalty of almost $221,500.
The CFTC has proven that Debiex was faking itself as a crypto platform. On March 13th, Judge Douglas granted the CFTC’s motion for summary judgment. Douglas said Debliex did not respond to the CFTC’s claims, and there’s no evidence that it was just “excusable neglect.”
CFTC filed a legal case against Debiex in January last year. It sued the platform for running a “pig butchering scam.”
The scam involved scammers developing fake romantic relationships with customers on social media, after which the customers were lured into investing in the bogus platform.
The platform scam-baited 5 victims. These victims made deposits of a total of $2.3 million on Debiex.
Zhāng Chéng Yáng was a “money mule” for Debiex, according to CFTC. This is because his wallet was used to receive the stolen funds from the victims.
On March 12, Judge Rayes approved a legal request (motion for default judgment) from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) against Zhāng. He accepted CFTC’s claims that Zhāng controlled the OKX crypto wallet “that received digital assets to which he had no legitimate claim.”
The judge found that OKX was “voluntarily preserving” the funds in Zhāng’s wallet. The wallet contained $5.70 worth of USTD and up to 63 ETH, which amounted to $119,500 in total. The judge has ordered the transfer of these funds back to an unnamed victim’s account.
Debiex reportedly hired female staff pretending to be successful traders
CFTC claims that scammers directed the victims toward Debiex websites through social media. The platform marketed itself as a “Blockchain Network Decentralized perpetual contract trading platform.” Customers were lured under the pretense of “mining transactions” and futures trading.
The details shared by CFTC state that Debiex staff consisted of women who would contact victims through “continuous and repeated messaging and sharing purported pictures of themselves.” These women portrayed themselves as “highly successful digital asset commodities traders.”
According to the CFTC, once a victim created an account on Debiex’s platform and sent their cryptocurrency as a so-called investment, the platform would lie to them about the performance of their funds. This “fictitious information” was based on customer balances, profits, and trading positions.
CFTC said, “All of this information was most likely false” and proved that customers’ digital assets were instead transferred to “numerous digital asset wallets in an attempt to obfuscate their destination.”
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