JPMorgan Sued for Allegedly Enabling $328 Million Crypto 'Ponzi Scheme'

In brief

• JPMorgan Chase was sued this week for allegedly enabling a $328 million crypto “Ponzi scheme.”
• Prosecutors say a crypto executive misused investor funds meant for liquidity pools to fund a lavish lifestyle.
• An alleged victim of the scheme is claiming Chase Bank should never have allowed the executive to use its services.

The biggest bank in the United States has been roped into a lawsuit over a customer’s alleged crypto “Ponzi scheme,” as the Department of Justice recently described it, with one of the operation’s victims arguing that JPMorgan Chase should have detected and stopped the misconduct. The suit, filed this week in a federal court in San Francisco, alleges JPMorgan Chase knowingly permitted one of its customers, Goliath Ventures, to carry out a massive, $328 million fraud that involved a fake crypto liquidity pool scheme and lavish misappropriations of customer funds. Last month, the operator of the alleged scheme, a Florida man named Christopher Alexander Delgado, was arrested by federal law enforcement on wire fraud and money laundering charges.

Delgado was the CEO of Goliath Ventures, a company that promised customers lucrative monthly returns on funds that were supposedly invested in liquidity pools—automated, user-fueled baskets of cryptocurrencies in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem that offer incentives for locking up tokens for a certain period of time. But Delgado did not send the vast majority of customer funds to liquidity pools, the Department of Justice asserts. Instead, he allegedly spent the money on lavish vacations, homes, parties, and payments to early investors in an effort to keep the scheme going. Now, one of the victims of that alleged scheme has sued Chase, arguing the bank “knowingly permitted” Goliath, one of its customers, to commingle investor funds and use them to power a Ponzi scheme. The lawsuit specifically claims that because Goliath publicly described itself as a crypto liquidity pool operator, Chase should have confirmed whether the company was registered with the CFTC and other regulators.

“As part of their Know Your Customer obligation, Chase could have and should have confirmed this before accepting the account or continuing to bank Goliath,” the complaint reads. “Chase knew that it had not done so and thus knowingly turned a blind eye.”  A representative for JPMorgan Chase declined to comment on this story when reached by Decrypt. The lawsuit notably cites the crypto-skeptical views of JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who has himself called Bitcoin “a decentralized Ponzi scheme.” “Dimon… warned for years that crypto was being used for fraudulent and criminal activities,” the lawsuit against the bank argues.