New York Asks a Court for $1.37 Billion From NovaTech's Founders

New York's attorney general's office has put a figure on what it wants from the couple behind NovaTech. A filing lodged on Thursday asks the court to order Cynthia Petion and Eddy Petion to pay $1,367,023,585 over the collapsed crypto operation. The office's own announcement that day called it about $1.3 billion. Four promoters settled separately, for nearly $6 million between them. The Petions left the United States without defending the case, and a default judgment against them was entered in August last year.

Two totals that do add up

The gap between the announced figure and the filed one is arithmetic, not contradiction. The Crypto Times published the components to the dollar on Thursday evening: $1,134,549,691 in principal disgorgement plus $232,473,894 in prejudgment interest. Those two add to $1.367 billion, and the office rounded down in public. crypto.news gives the same pair as $1.134 billion and roughly $232.5 million; Decrypt rounds them further still. The Block headlined the rounded number. No account read here flags the difference, so two totals have been circulating side by side since Thursday with nothing to explain them.

One sum is missing from every account. crypto.news reports a further $6.15 million sought in connection with AWS Mining, the scheme named alongside NovaTech in the original 2024 suit, interest included. That figure appears nowhere else, and nobody adds it to the NovaTech request to give a single number for both. The grand total is unpublished.

Where the money went

The filing traces deposits. Investors sent $1,160,544,294 of crypto into a NovaTech wallet between 15 August 2019 and 23 May 2023, a figure all three detailed accounts carry. Of that, at least $134,518,775 moved on to wallets belonging to the Petions. Only $25,994,603 ever reached the trading provider NovaTech used, and $18,189,417 of that was lost in trading. The company told investors it was a registered hedge fund broker licensed to trade crypto in the United States. It was neither. More than 11,000 New Yorkers put money in, drawn by advertised returns that Decrypt reports at 2% to 4% a week, above 140% a year; no other account read here gives the weekly band.

Four promoters, four settlements

The deals announced the same day are smaller and already agreed. Martin Zizi pays $2.9 million, Frantz Ciceron $2.05 million, James Corbett $750,000 and Ricardo Roy Sr. $275,861. The four add to $5,975,861, money earmarked for victims, and each carries a permanent ban from the securities, commodities and crypto industries. The recruitment structure they worked inside is described in the office's filings as an illegal pyramid scheme under New York's Martin Act, the state securities law the case is built on. Other jurisdictions have gone after crypto operators by different routes this month, among them Turkey, which confirmed an arrest and a $7.15 million cash seizure in a separate matter.

A number is not a recovery

Nothing in Thursday's filing says where the Petions are. The SEC charged them in August 2024 over an alleged $650 million fraud, two months after the state suit, and the federal case puts the number of investors defrauded above 200,000 worldwide. The default judgment of August 2025 already bars the pair from the industries they worked in; what Thursday's filing puts to the court is money. Whether any of it can be collected from defendants outside the country is a different question, and courts have spent years picking through who owns seized crypto without arriving at a clean answer. Tens of thousands of investors lost access to their funds when NovaTech stopped paying in May 2023. The promoters' $5.98 million is the only money in this case with a date attached.