Latvia will extradite to US for prosecution person suspected of embezzling USD 7 million

• Published date: 29 July 2022
• Publication title: LETA

RIGA, July 29 (LETA) - Today, the Supreme Court (AT) decided to allow the extradition of Latvian national Ivars Auzins to the United States for criminal prosecution, who, together with his accomplices, is suspected of embezzling USD 7 million, LETA has found out.

The State Police, without revealing the person's name, previously informed that the suspect, together with accomplices, had committed fraudulent activities by creating fake investment platforms.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2021 charged the Latvian citizen with defrauding hundreds of retail investors out of at least USD 7 million through two separate fraudulent digital asset securities offerings.

ccording to the civil complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Ivars Auzins defrauded U.S. and foreign investors through the unregistered offer and sale of digital asset securities in an initial coin offering and a purported digital asset cloud mining program. Auzins allegedly used fake names, fictitious entities, and fraudulent profiles to perpetrate his schemes, and misappropriated nearly all of the investor funds that were raised.

In the first scheme, the complaint alleges that, from January 2018 through March 2018, Auzins fraudulently offered and sold unregistered digital tokens as part of an ICO of Denaro, a purported "multi-currency debit card platform." Specifically, the complaint alleges that Auzins falsely claimed Denaro enabled users to store their digital assets in a secure digital wallet and then spend them "like any other debit card" which could be provided by a credit...