US authorities arrest and indict a new man in the OneCoin scheme – who is William Morrow?
United States Department of Justice officials have arrested and charged William Moron with bank fraud in connection with the OneCoin crypto scheme.
On April 23, according to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Morrow In 2016, he was responsible for transferring $35 million in OneCoin-related funds from bank accounts in China to Hong Kong. It is part of a scheme to defraud more than $6 million from a Hong Kong account to the US.
Morrow voluntarily surrendered to authorities and pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud. He was released on his own recognizance pending a sentencing hearing scheduled for August 1. Justice Department officials included a forfeiture order related to illegal assets in the OneCoin lawsuit.
Reports suggest Moro is dating Gilbert Armenta, the boyfriend of OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova. Armenta was sentenced to five years in prison in 2023 for his role in siphoning off nearly $300 million in the OneCoin scheme. Morrow is listed as a managing partner of the Inter-American Group and a board member of AEE Power.
Eight years after Morrow committed the fraud, it is unclear what information prompted US authorities to file a superseding case. The Department of Justice has indicted several individuals for their roles in the OneCoin scheme, including attorney Mark Scott, former head of legal and compliance Irina Dilkinska, and co-founder Carl Sebastian Greenwood.
Ignatova, also known as the ‘CryptoQueen', has been charged in the US, but remains at large at the time of publication. She is currently on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
Related: OneCoin: A deep dive into crypto's most notorious Ponzi scheme
According to filings filed April 23, Morrow has retained Mark Cohen and Jonathan Abernethy of the law firm Cohen & Gresser. Cohen represented Sam Bankman-Fried in the 2023 criminal trial, in which the former FTX CEO was convicted of seven felony counts and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
In the year Founded in 2014, OneCoin It was exposed as a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme in 2015, defrauding investors of nearly $4 billion. In Moro's case, the charge of conspiracy to commit bank fraud carries a sentence of up to 30 years in prison.
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