PANews reported on February 7 that according to Cointelegraph, the U.S. federal court recently imposed additional criminal penalties on Firoz Patel, the founder of the Canadian cryptocurrency payment platform Payza. Dabney Friedrich, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., announced on February 6 that Patel was sentenced to 41 months in prison for concealing 450 bitcoin assets and obstructing judicial proceedings. Previously, the defendant had been sentenced to three years in prison in 2020 for illegal operation of cross-border payment business and money laundering.
A review of the case shows that Patel founded AlertPay (later renamed Payza) in 2004. The platform processed cryptocurrency transactions without obtaining a US financial license and provided money laundering channels for illegal funds such as pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes. In the 2020 plea agreement, Patel was sentenced to three years in prison and was required to surrender his illegal gains, but he lied that he only held a $30,000 retirement account, but in fact he secretly transferred the Bitcoin assets held by the platform.
According to the Ministry of Justice, Patel immediately began to transfer assets after the 2020 verdict: he first tried to transfer Bitcoin through the Binance exchange, but was blocked in April 2021 due to account anomalies; he then used his father's identity to open an account at Blockchain.com, which froze the funds after detecting suspicious transactions; he even instructed business partners to forge identity documents in an attempt to unfreeze the assets. While serving his sentence, Patel learned that the prosecutors were tracking the movement of 450 Bitcoins, and when he was about to be released from prison, he hired someone to pretend to be a lawyer, attempting to delay the investigation through false legal documents so that he could abscond.
