Cryptocurrency con lands Sheepshead Bay programmer in prison
A Sheepshead Bay computer programmer and cryptocurrency promoter was sentenced Monday to 18 months in prison for conspiring to commit fraud.
According to officials, 39-year-old Maksim Zaslavskiy and others fraudulently marketed a pair of ICOs, or initial coin offerings, to the public during what Crain’s New York called “Bitcoin mania” in 2017.
ICOs, a type of digital currency, were a “hot market” then, according to Crain’s. Investors poured more than $20 billion into thousands of crypto-deals — among them, “REcoin” and “Diamond,” sham ICOs headed by Zaslavskiy.