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A pair of Estonian men pled guilty to fraud charges in connection with a global crypto mining scheme that took in over US$577 million from investors.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced that the pair — Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turõgin — each pled guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy, and agreed to forfeit over US$400 million in assets, for duping investors in a crypto mining scheme.

According to court filings, Potapenko and Turõgin sold contracts that offered investors a share of cryptoassets mined by their crypto mining service, HashFlare, but vastly overstated the scale of their operation.

“Between 2015 and 2019, Hashflare’s sales totaled more than US$577 million, but HashFlare did not possess the requisite computing capacity to perform the vast majority of the mining the defendants told HashFlare customers it performed,” the DoJ said in a release.

In fact, U.S. authorities alleged that the company performed Bitcoin mining at a rate of less than 1% of the computing power it purported to have. And, they alleged the company provided customers with falsified data that purported to show their mining profits.

Instead of generating those profits, “Potapenko and Turõgin used the proceeds of the fraud conspiracy to purchase real estate and luxury vehicles and maintained investment and cryptocurrency accounts,” the DoJ said.

The pair was originally charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, 16 counts of wire fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. They are now scheduled to be sentenced on May 8 in a U.S. federal district court.