Three Years in Prison for One fo the Masterminds behind Crypto Ponzi Scheme

Lilia Nuriyeva participated in the Finiko Ponzi scheme as a key executive for the Finiko company. She is now sentenced to three years in prison.

Nuriyeva is one of several Finiko executives who are waiting to go to trial for their crimes, which include the company’s co-founder Kirill Doronin. Doronin served as the company’s public face, and he was arrested back in 2021.

Nuriyeva is being sentenced for crimes that caused as much as $55 million in damage. The company’s scheme involved the provisions of master classes that turned out to be scams to involve more and more people in what the company was doing. The classes were little more than attempts to have people invite their friends to invest in the company in the hopes that someday they would see a return on their investment.

The company promised its investors very high returns and was not able to produce those kinds of results for them. They also offered dividends within the company that turned out to be fake. The company’s executives, including Nuriyeva, are accused of creating a criminal community and orchestrating fraud on a massive scale.

Finiko Scammed Its Participants for Millions of Dollars

The scheme that Finiko used is similar to that of the MMM Ponzi scheme, which promised its investors that they would earn incredible dividends off of a new cryptocurrency and the company’s system of stock trading. The company continued its highly successful scheme from 2018 until 2021.

The company’s executives moved all across Russia, leaving a trail of financial ruin in their wake. They offer their master classes to thousands of interested individuals, and they told the people that their automated system would earn them profit through no effort of their own.

Many of those who participated sold their homes and took out large loans. Investors were supposed to be able to pull out their dividends in Bitcoin, but when the Finiko company’s cryptocurrency launched and then self-destructed, the investors were left with nothing.  

The charges against Nuriyeva were such that she was supposed to face 10 years in prison to begin with, but the penalty was decreased to three years because of a pretrial agreement she made with the government.