Solomon Samuel 
Former IcomTech CEO Ochoa Gets 5-Year Sentence
Former IcomTech CEO was found guilty by the court for operating a cryptocurrency-based Ponzi scheme guilty of promising daily returns.
After pleading guilty to conspiracy to conduct wire fraud, former IcomTech CEO Ochoa of the cryptocurrency mining company IcomTech, received a five-year jail sentence.
Judge Jennifer Rochon issued an order on January 19, requiring Ochoa to voluntarily surrender on March 19 to serve his sixty-month sentence.
Additionally, she ordered that Ochoa forfeit the sum of $914,000. Ochoa will be under supervision for two years upon release. Ochoa pleaded guilty in September to conspiring to commit wire fraud in connection with a cryptocurrency-based Ponzi scheme conducted at IcomTech.
Between the years 2018 and 2019, he served as the Chief Executive Officer of the mining company. IcomTech was one of these large-scale copycat cryptocurrency scams, and Ochoa, as the purported CEO played an important role in taking IcomTech to scale and ultimately harming more victims stated the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Damian Williams, in September.
According to the Department of Justice, IcomTech made a promise to investors that they would get daily returns on investment products, nevertheless, they were unable to withdraw their money. The authorities brought charges against the former IcomTech CEO Ochoa and other officials of IcomTech in November 2022, some three years after the company had gone out of business.
Additionally, in December 2023, David Carmona, the creator of IcomTech, entered a guilty plea to one count of conspiracy to conduct wire fraud within the same court.
Former IcomTech CEO Ochoa was the first person to be punished, while the other four former executives identified as defendants in the case have filed guilty and not guilty pleas. In the past year, numerous crypto personalities have been making appearances in courtrooms as a direct result of a crackdown by authorities in the United States.
In November 2023, authorities found Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of FTX, guilty of seven felony charges, and he is expected to be sentenced in March of the following year.
As part of an agreement between the prosecution and the cryptocurrency exchange, Changpeng Zhao, who had previously served as the CEO of Binance, entered a guilty plea to one count of felony.