Yang Bin, chairman of Singaporean company A&A, was sentenced to 6 years in prison for allegedly organizing a crypto mining Ponzi scheme

A Dutch man set up an investment company in Singapore to conduct a "Ponzi scheme", falsely claiming to cooperate with a cryptocurrency mining company, owning a large number of mining machines, and recruiting three people to conspire to defraud more than 700 people of a total of 6.7 million yuan. After one of the accomplices was imprisoned, the mastermind was also imprisoned. The mastermind is Yang Bin from the Netherlands, who was the chairman of A&A Blockchain Innovation Pte Ltd (A&A) at the time of the crime. He faced 19 charges including fraud and violation of the employment of foreign manpower laws. On August 26, he pleaded guilty to eight of them in the Singapore National Court. After taking the remaining items into consideration, the judge sentenced him to six years in prison and a fine of 16,000 yuan. The case shows that the defendant set up A&A in April 2021 to provide investment plans for cryptocurrency mining. A&A falsely claimed to cooperate with a cryptocurrency mining company in Yunnan, China, and owned 70% of the latter's 300,000 mining machines; mining machines can mine cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. A&A promised investors that they could earn 0.5% of their investment profit every day. In fact, A&A did not cooperate with the Chinese company and did not own mining machines. This was actually a "Ponzi scheme"; A&A used the investment funds of new investors to pay "profits" to old investors. According to court documents, Yang Bin recruited three Chinese men to participate in the scam, namely Lu Huangbin (60 years old), Wang Xinghong (40 years old) and Chen Wei (43 years old). The three served as A&A's president, technical director, and director and Yang Bin's personal assistant. (Singapore Lianhe Zaobao) Earlier on August 10, it was reported that Wang Xinghong, CTO of Singaporean company A&A, was sentenced to 5 years in prison for participating in a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme.