Homero Joshua Garza, the former CEO of GAWminers LLC and the creator of PayCoin, got off his punishment easy. Josh was threatened with imprisonment for 20 years but will be able to get out of prison already in 2021.
Garza - one of the very first crypto fraudsters. In 2014, in U.S. Connecticut he created the company GAW Miners and ZenMiners and launched the crypto project PayCoin (XPY). All startups turned out to be a scam.
Garza sold contracts for cloud mining - despite the fact that no pool had the declared power capacity. As the prosecutor stated, Gaw Miner sold hashlets more than the computing powers at its disposal. The payments to the first users were made by Garza from the new revenues. In 2015, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission won the court against GAW Miners and ZenMiners. Then it became known that the PayCoin project was an attempt to continue the scheme started by GAW Miners and prevent the collapse of the company.
PayCoin worked on SHA-256 and used Proof-of-Work and Proof of State as consensus building algorithms. The founder of GAW Miners promised that PayCoin would never cost less than $20, but in fact, XPY could not rise above $15.92.
The sentence for Garza will begin on January 4, 2019. Once released, Josh is unlikely to see Ferrari parked outside his house, as the court ordered him to pay compensations to the defrauded investors amounted to $9.2 million.