Elmin Redzepagic: Guilty Plea Over $1.16M of Investors' Bitcoin He Bet and Lost on Stake.com

In September 2023, agents from IRS Criminal Investigation, the tax agency's police arm, interviewed a young man from Wolcott, Connecticut. Elmin Redzepagic told them several things that were not true, prosecutors say, and he has now admitted lying to them. The scheme ran on for another 18 months, until March 2025.

On 19 October 2026 Redzepagic, now 25, stood before US District Judge Kari A. Dooley in Bridgeport and pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud, one count of international money laundering and one count of lying to those IRS agents, the US Attorney's Office for the District of Connecticut announced. Between May 2021 and March 2025 he had told people he was a skilled crypto investor. He was not investing their money. He was betting it on Stake.com, an offshore online casino, and losing it.

The prosecutors' announcement puts the net loss at $1,159,945 across more than 10 victims. When he was charged in February, prosecutors had described a net loss of about $950,000. Neither announcement explains the gap. Both figures are described as net losses; prosecutors have not explained why the number grew. He is free on a $500,000 bond until sentencing, which Judge Dooley has set for 11 January 2027.

Stake.com was not charged or accused of wrongdoing. In the prosecutors' announcements it is the place the money went, not a party to the case.

The pitch and the Chef

The story Redzepagic told was a familiar one. He said he made high returns trading digital assets, and that he worked with a team led by a figure he called "The Chef", who decided when and how investors got paid. Victims were told to send bitcoin, the best-known cryptocurrency, a digital currency that no bank runs and whose payments cannot be reversed once sent, much like handing over cash.

After the first deposit, investors were told their money had grown. To take the profits out, they were told, they first had to pay "gas fees". A gas fee is a real thing in crypto: the small charge a network takes to process a transfer, roughly like the dealing fee a broker charges on a share trade. A real one is taken automatically when a payment is sent. It is never paid separately to a person before a withdrawal is released, and a demand for one is among the most common signs of an investment scam. Here the fees were simply more money for the same account.

Prosecutors have not said whether The Chef existed. No one else has been charged.

Where the money went

The mechanics were simpler than the pitch. According to prosecutors, Redzepagic used his Stake.com account to generate the bitcoin addresses he gave to victims. A bitcoin address works like an account number for receiving payments, and a casino will issue one so that a player can deposit funds. So when an investor sent bitcoin to what they thought was a trading account, it landed in a gambling balance. In stock market terms, it was like a broker handing a client the deposit details for his own betting account.

He used the same Stake.com balance to hold the proceeds of the scheme and to make what prosecutors call "lulling payments", which they described as large: payouts to some victims that made the investment look real and kept them calm, or persuaded them to put in more. It is the oldest trick in the Ponzi scheme playbook, where early investors are paid with later investors' money, though the announcements do not say exactly where each payout came from. The rest he bet, and lost.

Stake was founded in 2017 by two Australians, Ed Craven and Bijan Tehrani, and runs under a gaming licence from Curaçao in the Caribbean through a company called Medium Rare N.V. It is one of the largest crypto casinos in the world and has spent heavily on sport and celebrity sponsorship. It is called offshore because no US state licenses it for real-money gambling, and its terms bar players in the United States. Stake runs a separate American site, Stake.us, as a sweepstakes casino, a format that uses virtual coins, some of which can be swapped for prizes, instead of direct cash bets. The prosecutors' announcements say only that he used Stake.com; they do not say how a Connecticut resident reached a site that turns away US players.

That offshore leg is what turned a local fraud into international money laundering. Moving fraud money out of the United States to keep a scheme going or to hide it is a separate federal crime from the fraud itself, and the plea includes one such count tied to the transfers to the casino abroad.

From 21 counts to four

A federal grand jury in New Haven returned a 21-count indictment on 20 January 2026: seven counts of wire fraud (using phone or internet messages to cheat people out of money), 11 counts of international money laundering and three counts of making false statements to IRS Criminal Investigation agents. On 12 February he appeared before US Magistrate Judge Thomas O. Farris in Hartford, pleaded not guilty to all of them and was released on the $500,000 bond. By then he was living in Florida, prosecutors said. ReadWrite, citing a roster page, reported that he had played men's basketball at Southern Connecticut State University.

The plea covers four of the 21 counts. Each wire fraud count and the money laundering count carries a maximum of 20 years in prison, and the false statement count up to five, according to the Justice Department. On paper that adds up to 65 years. Federal judges set sentences using the US Sentencing Guidelines, which weigh the loss, the number of victims and a defendant's history, and the sentences handed down are usually far below the maximum. The public announcements do not say whether he agreed a sentencing range with prosecutors, how much restitution (money a court orders paid back to victims) he will owe, or what happens to the other 17 counts. In federal plea deals the remaining counts are usually dropped at sentencing.

©CMZ chart. Data: US Attorney, District of Connecticut

The case was investigated by IRS Criminal Investigation, whose New England office is led by Special Agent in Charge Thomas Demeo, and is prosecuted by Assistant US Attorney Susan Wines under US Attorney David X. Sullivan.

Not the first, not the last

"I trade crypto for you" has covered for spending before. Aiden Pleterski, the self-styled "Crypto King" of Ontario, is on trial in Toronto, accused of taking investors' money to trade and simply spending it; a bankruptcy trustee put the sum he took in at C$41.5 million. He has pleaded not guilty and the allegations have not been proven. Rathnakishore Giri, an Ohio investment manager who said he was an expert in bitcoin trading, was jailed for nine years in May 2026 over a $10 million Ponzi scheme that paid for Lamborghinis. What sets this case apart is how little cover was needed: no fake trading platform, no website, no app. Victims sent bitcoin straight into a casino account, and one man's word about The Chef kept them sending more.