The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has extradited a Swedish man from Thailand to stand trial for crypto fraud. According to a press release by the DoJ, Roger Nils-Jonas Karlsson is charged with wire fraud, money laundering and securities fraud.
Karlsson is the proprietor of Eastern Metal Securities, a company that lured investors with promises of physical gold for a small initial investment. He was indicted in July by a federal grand jury which charged him with engaging in a scheme to defraud victims of more than $11 million.
The DoJ alleges that since 2006, Karlsson used various websites to communicate false representations to victims in order to get them to invest in his schemes. The most renowned of his schemes is Eastern Metal Securities, a fictitious company which advertised shares in a product known as a “Pre Funded Reversed Pension Plan” (PFRPP).
Karlsson created a website for the company, registered it under a fictitious person and then used it to invite investors to purchase shares of the PFRPP for $98 a share. In exchange, he promised them they would receive an eventual payout of 1.15 kilograms of gold per share. However, back in January, this amount of gold was worth more than $45,000.
To make the scam seem legitimate, Karlsson allegedly promised his investors that in the unlikely event that the gold payout failed, he would personally pay them back at least 97% of their investment. Federal investigators later came to discover that Karlsson didn’t hold enough money in his accounts to pay off the investors.
All the money he raised from his fraudulent scheme went straight to his personal account and is now said to be tied up in real estate properties in Thailand.
Karlsson also had another company known as HCI25 which he used to further dupe his investors. When they demanded for their money, Karlsson found various ways to delay the payment. The DoJ claims that at one point, he told his investors that the delay was because releasing so much money at once could affect the global financial system.
As CoinGeek reported, Karlsson was arrested in Thailand in June and will now be prosecuted in the U.S.
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