NovaTech: The $1 Billion Crypto Scheme That Spread Through Prayer Groups

Every week for nearly four years, the people with money in NovaTech logged in and found it had grown, typically by 2% to 4%. NovaTech said the gains came from its traders, who bet on currency exchange rates and on cryptocurrency, digital money that moves over the internet without a bank. It never reported a losing week. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), each week Cynthia Petion, NovaTech's co-founder and chief executive, typed the percentage into the company's system by hand and ran the software that credited it to every account.

On Thursday 22 October 2026, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced $5.98 million in settlements with four of the scheme's top promoters: Martin Zizi will pay $2.9 million, Frantz Ciceron $2.05 million, James Corbett $750,000 and Ricardo Roy Sr. $275,861. All four are permanently banned from the securities, commodities and crypto industries, and each settled without admitting or denying New York's allegations. The same day she asked a Manhattan judge to order Cynthia Petion and her husband, Eddy Petion, NovaTech's co-founder and chief operating officer, to pay more than $1.3 billion. The couple have never answered the case. The Attorney General says they fled the country.

Between August 2019 and May 2023, investors sent NovaTech crypto worth $1,160,544,294, according to New York's analysis of its payment records. NovaTech put $25,994,603 of it, about 2%, into a real trading account, and its traders lost $18,189,417 of that. More than 11,000 New Yorkers invested. The SEC, working from different records, puts deposits at more than $650 million from more than 200,000 investors worldwide. When NovaTech collapsed in May 2023, tens of thousands of them could not withdraw anything.

This is not EminiFX, the 5%-a-week scheme whose founder, Eddy Alexandre, was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2023. Both spread through Haitian-American communities of faith. NovaTech ran for almost four years rather than eight months, took in more than four times as much, and no criminal charges over it have been made public.

Prayer groups, WhatsApp and Haitian Creole

New York says NovaTech targeted Haitian and other immigrant communities in prayer groups and WhatsApp chats, with adverts in Haitian Creole and religious messages. Cynthia Petion called herself "The Reverend CEO", described NovaTech as "God's vision" and told recruiters in a 2022 training video that "Jesus was the best affiliate marketer in the world," the SEC says. In private, according to New York's complaint as reported by Reuters, she called herself the "Zookeeper" and described investors as a "cult" where "they just agree with everything you say."

Zizi, of Kennesaw, Georgia, the first to reach NovaTech's top rank of Two Star Ambassador, ran weekly Zoom calls in English and Haitian Creole. In a January 2022 video he called the Petions "the people that God g[a]ve the vision to start this company" and spoke to viewers who had lost their jobs in the pandemic. The minimum stake was $99.

When New York sued in June 2024, Renold Julien of Konbit Neg Lakay, a Haitian-American community centre in Rockland County, said many Haitians in the Hudson Valley had walked for "weeks, months" through Central America to reach the United States. "Konbit Neg Lakay is looking for full restitution," he said.

How the scheme worked

Investors opened an account on NovaTech's website and bought "trading packages" by sending crypto, often USDT, a stablecoin that works as a digital dollar. The deposits landed at CoinPayments, a payment processor that holds and forwards crypto much as a card processor handles a shop's takings, in an account only Cynthia Petion could operate. NovaTech, registered in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, said it pooled the money for its traders and passed 70% of their profits to investors.

The real engine was recruitment. NovaTech was multi-level marketing: members earned commissions for bringing in new investors, and on everyone those recruits brought in, their "downline". When the pay at the top is funded by money joining at the bottom, that is a pyramid scheme. New York and the SEC both say it was also a Ponzi scheme, paying "profits" and withdrawals out of other investors' deposits. Of the $1.16 billion that came in, $1.15 billion went back out, and at least $134.5 million of it reached wallets belonging to the Petions, New York says. The SEC, using other records, traced a smaller sum, at least $5.8 million, directly to the couple.

NovaTech also claimed to be regulated. "We are registered in USA as a hedge fund and money management company," Cynthia Petion wrote on WhatsApp in March 2020. It was not registered with any US regulator, the SEC says. Its "own trading platform" was MetaTrader 5, off-the-shelf software rented from a company called B2Broker. Roy, her brother and NovaTech's chief technology officer, told investors in a 2020 YouTube video that NovaTech was licensed to trade crypto in the US and that losing everything was "highly unlikely", New York's findings say.

The Petions had done this before. They were the top US promoters of AWS Mining, which sold contracts in crypto mining (computers that process transactions on a network such as bitcoin's and are paid in new coins) and promised 15% to 20% a month. Texas ordered it to stop in November 2018 and it collapsed by April 2019. Publicly the Petions called themselves victims; privately, New York says, Cynthia Petion told Roy in a WhatsApp chat that she had made at least $3 million from it. Zizi, Corbett and Ciceron had promoted AWS too.

The collapse

Withdrawals slowed from about October 2022. Securities regulators in British Columbia and Alberta issued fraud warnings that month, and California's Department of Financial Protection and Innovation ordered NovaTech to stop on 22 November. On 5 February 2023 NovaTech froze withdrawals from trading accounts for 60 days. On 17 March B2Broker cut off its trading software, which investors were not told, New York says. The day before the freeze was due to end, new rules sharply limited withdrawals. On 11 May NovaTech said it was halting US operations, and its website went dark. The couple had left their home in Wellington, Florida, a year earlier; the SEC believes they live in Panama.

What the promoters agreed to pay

Roy settled first, in June 2024, handing back $275,861 that NovaTech had paid him. Zizi signed in November 2025 to pay in four instalments during 2026; he had already agreed a $100,000 penalty with the SEC. Ciceron will pay $1.35 million in cash plus whatever the court-appointed receiver of EminiFX owes him and his company, Kings Multi Services Agency, as claimants in that case; New York counts the total as $2.05 million. Corbett, whom Cynthia Petion called a "Founding Leader", signed on 20 October 2026 to pay $200,000 in instalments running to July 2030. The other $550,000 falls due only if he earns more than $80,000 a year.

The $5.98 million is about half of one per cent of what went in. New York says it is for the benefit of victims; its announcement does not say how they will claim it.

Where are the Petions?

In New York the Petions never responded. On 4 August 2025 Justice Anar Rathod Patel entered a default judgment, a ruling against a party that does not turn up to defend itself, finding that New York had proved its fraud claims and ordering the couple to hand over investor records within 30 days. They have produced nothing. The new filing asks for $1.13 billion (the deposits minus the $26 million sent for trading), $232 million in interest and about $6 million more over AWS Mining: $1.37 billion in all. Matching it to victims will be hard: the records identify investors only by usernames such as "stanleysmoneytree" and "moneywhileyousleep".

The SEC, which sued in Miami federal court in August 2024, asked Panama to deliver its papers under an inter-American treaty, and the Panamanian authorities could not find the couple. Two promoters said they might be in Dubai, but immigration records showed the Petions had last left the United Arab Emirates in April 2019. In January 2026 the judge let the SEC serve them by email and online, noting a Panamanian WhatsApp number they had recently used to message Cynthia Petion's brother. They did not respond, and a default was entered against them on 10 March 2026.