Topic: US citizen charge with running a Ponzi scheme/crypto token backed by diamond (Read 197 times)

I agree, what we are seeing is just the repeat, and scammers are not going to stop even though one of them have been caught already. To be fair, there might be some projects that are legit but we can that 90% of precious backed projects are out right scams. But the problem is that investors still fall for this old trick because of the current hype on Defi, pushing the altcoin market into a sort of mini bull run that's why investors are pouring their money on every new Defi or precious metals back projects.

I was curious about something, and of course, the coin had an ANN  here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/first-cryptocurrency-correlated-to-natural-fancy-colored-diamonds-4976843
99% shilling material.


I don't know how is it in your country but here you're losing tons of money if you try to sell gold jewelry at a pawn shop.
I've once enquired about this during the last crisis when we were low on cahs we needed money to keep the farm running before the paychecks came and the prices for old were simply a no go, not even counting the fact that they don't give a fact about the value of the jewel itself.

Everyone talks about how good it is to have a reserve in gold but most of them have never been forced to actually make use of it.

But anyhow, this time there is really no comparison, investing in a promise of payment versus something tangible in your possesion.

Diamonds? Nah? better go with Gold, been investing in a form of jewelries, used to buy gold jewelries like 20 years ago, and up to now, I can still make use of it, specially if I need quick cash, just go to the nearest pawnshop  .

Honestly, there are still some new project that use the previous metal backed base project to scam cryptocurrency investors but what dont make people aware of there existence is because the Defi project are project with huge traffic lately and as theres scam precious metal backed project so theres also genuine project out there. This is the reason why i took my time to expose some lied precious metal backed crypto project.

Crypto backed by Diamond, Lol, or any precious metals for that matter, sounds like a scam. I think this is during the height of ICO in 2017 that's why it attracted a lot of investors back then because there are too many who just blindly trust on ICO that time. And I think this is the one, First cryptocurrency correlated to natural fancy colored diamonds!.

$25 million imo sounds kinda medium sized for scams that go on here, I bet we've had a lot higher in crypto by now.

You're definitely better off buying diamonds/gold and storing them or investing in their production, vaulted stuff is vat free to ensure you can't get hold of it imo (or are greatly discouraged). I do remember a lot of schemes that were diamond backed back in the day (I'm sure there was a dnd coin or something) doubt much happened with those either other than a wealthy anonymous ceo.

MIAMI -- South Florida federal prosecutors have charged 51-year-old Jose Angel Aman, of Washington D.C., with wire fraud, for allegedly operating a fraudulent diamond investment scheme.

Ariana Fajardo Orshan, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, and George L. Piro, Special Agent in Charge, FBI Miami Field Office, made the announcement.

According to the allegations of a criminal information, from May 2014 through May 2019, Aman and his partners solicited people throughout the United States and Canada to invest in diamond contracts.  It is alleged that Aman and his partners promised investors that they would use their money to purchase rough colored diamonds, which Aman would cut, polish and resell at a profit. They reassured investors that their money was safe because it was secured by Aman’s inventory of diamonds (purportedly valued at $25 million). Aman and his partners presented the investment as a high return, no risk deal.

These promises and statements were  false.  According to the information, Aman rarely used investors’ money to purchase rough diamonds. He never cut, polished and resold rough diamonds. Nor did Aman have a $25 million diamond  inventory. To conceal the fraud from investors, Aman allegedly made purported interest payments to investors by using new investors’ money to pay earlier ones.  According to the charging document, at the end of the investment period, Aman and the partners would convince the investors to roll over their money by falsely claiming that the investors had the full value of their investments to put into new deals.  They allegedly provided sham “Reinvestment Contracts” to the investors,  a tactic they  used to buy time until Aman could locate new investors and additional money.

It is alleged that when this scheme was about to collapse, Aman set up a new business, Argyle Coin, LLC, which was purportedly in the business of developing a cryptocurrency token backed by diamonds.  Aman solicited new investors for Argyle, promising high rates of return with no risk.  Aman allegedly used only a fraction of the money received from Argyle investors to develop a cryptocurrency token, instead using most of it to pay purported interest payments to the earlier investors and to benefit himself and his partners, according to the charging document.