New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking to have the founder of the defunct cryptocurrency trading platform NovaTech pay nearly $1.4 billion. However, James indicates that actually recovering this money might be another matter, as the couple has already fled the United States.

This request stems from a default judgment in August 2025. The judgment was made after the Petion couple left the United States and did not respond to the state government's lawsuit. The judgment also prohibits them from continuing to engage in the securities, commodities, and cryptocurrency industries.

James filed a lawsuit against NovaTech and AWS Mining as early as June 2024, accusing them of defrauding investors of over $1 billion. Two months later, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also filed charges against Petion and others, alleging a fraud amounting to $650 million.

James said in a statement: "These scammers targeted immigrants and religious communities with promises of a better life, only to steal their life savings in the end."

New York State stated that, in fact, between 2019 and 2023, NovaTech transferred only just under $26 million to its trading service providers, with approximately $18.2 million in losses. The state government indicated that the weekly rebates and bonuses for attracting new investors came from the deposits of these new investors. When NovaTech collapsed in 2023, tens of thousands of investors were unable to withdraw their funds.

Data from payment processor CoinPayments shows that investors deposited approximately $1.16 billion in cryptocurrencies into the wallet of NovaTech between August 2019 and May 2023, with Cynthia Petion being the only authorized user of that account. At least $134.5 million flowed into the wallet belonging to the couple Petion. After deducting the funds used for transactions, the state government is seeking recovery of about $1.13 billion, plus $232 million in interest.