Former Deutsche Bank executive Rashawn Russell has been found guilty of running a Ponzi-like scheme where he promised investors "guaranteed" cryptocurrency results. 

Bloomberg reported that the 28-year-old ex-banker was sentenced by a Brooklyn, New York court Thursday (May 30) to 41 months in prison, and was ordered to pay $1.5 million in victim reparations. 

Cointelegraph also reported that Russel ran the fraudulent R3 Crypto Fund from November 2020 to August 2022. 

In a separate case, he also obtained 97 bank cards with at least 43 identities with the intention of using them for fraudulent transactions between September 2021 and June 2023.

Russell could have been sentenced to 30 years in prison, but he previously pleaded guilty in September to fraud charges. 

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Russel's Crypto Fraud

Prosecutors said that Russell started raising money from his friends, college classmates, and work colleagues in November 2020, promising them that he would invest their money in digital assets. 

He also guaranteed some of his investors that they would profit returns between 25% and 100%, prosecutors added. 

Russel has already repaid some of the earlier investors with some of the money he raised, while much of it was used for personal expenses and even gambling. His scheme continued to operate between August 2022 and April 2023, when he was arrested. 

Russel worked with Deutsche Bank from 2018 to 2021 as an investment banker. According to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority's BrokerCheck, he previously studied at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts and spent his summer internship with both Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase & Co..

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