Lawsuit Prosecutors: Shavers and Judge

lawsuit prosecutors: Shavers, who went by "pirateat40" online, was arrested in November 2014, two months after a federal judge in Texas ordered him to pay $US40.7 million in a related US Securities and Exchange Commission civil lawsuit, according to Nine News Australia. Prosecutors said from 2011 to 2012, Shavers, 33, raised at least 764,000 bitcoins, which at the time were worth more than $US4.5 million , for his Bitcoin Savings and Trust. Trendon Shavers, who operated Bitcoin Savings and Trust, was also ordered by US District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan to forfeit $US1.23 million and pay restitution in the same amount for operating what the judge called a "class Ponzi scheme"."You defrauded innocent people," he said. "You did it, in the last analysis, for personal gain."Shavers, who pleaded guilty in September 2015 to one count of securities fraud and who now supports himself as a cook, said in court he had "royally messed up" and had lost friends and embarrassed his family as a result of his fraud."I don't think this is something I'm ever going to get over," he said on Thursday. He operated the business from his home, offering bitcoin-related investments through the internet. While Shavers invested some of the bitcoins with Mt Gox, the now-defunct Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange, he largely in typical Ponzi scheme fashion used new investors' bitcoins to pay back prior investors, prosecutors said. Prosecutors said Shavers solicited the investments on the website Bitcoin Forum, and promised interest rates of 7 per cent per week to investors who loaned bitcoins to Bitcoin Savings and Trust while he pursued a market arbitrage strategy. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.