Odaily Planet Daily News: The U.S. Department of Justice announced that the operators of the defunct cloud mining service HashFlare, Estonian citizens Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turõgin, admitted to participating in a multi-level cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme involving $577 million. HashFlare provided cloud mining services between 2015 and 2019, but its actual mining capacity was far lower than advertised, and its Bitcoin mining computing power was less than 1% of what it claimed. The company also defrauded investments through the fake crypto bank Polybius and failed to pay dividends to customers, causing losses to hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide. The two were arrested in Estonia in November 2022 and extradited to the United States. They pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and will face up to 20 years in prison and confiscate assets worth more than $400 million to compensate victims. (The Block)