NEW YORK–Trevon Gross, the former chairman and CEO of Helping Other People Excel FCU (HOPE FCU), and Yuri Lebedev, a former member of the credit union’s board as well as former employee of Coin.mx, a Bitcoin exchange, have been found guilty today in Manhattan federal court in connection with a bribery scheme to take over control of HOPE FCU and a fraud scheme in furtherance of the operations of Coin.mx.
According to Joon H. Kim, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the jury convicted Gross and Lebedev on all counts with which they were charged in the controlling indictment following a four-week trial before U.S. District Judge Alison J. Nathan.
“Yuri Lebedev and others at Coin.mx, an unlawful Bitcoin exchange, tricked banks into processing millions of dollars in transactions by hiding the true nature of their business,” said Kim in a statement. “When the banks caught on to their scheme, Lebedev and others bribed Trevon Gross so they could have a captive credit union to process those transactions, undermining the credit union’s safety and solvency. Despite elaborate efforts to hide their schemes, the defendants’ conduct was exposed at trial and found for what they were, federal crimes.”
According to the indictment, the scheme involving the credit union began in 2014, in an effort further to evade scrutiny from financial institutions about the nature of the business engaged in by Coin.mx, The co-conspirators gained control of HOPE FCU, a federal credit union in New Jersey with primarily low-income members, after making more than $150,000 in illegal bribes at Gross’ direction to bank accounts in the name of a church where Gross served as the pastor, the indictment states. Gross also ceded operational control of the credit union to the board members installed by Murgio, including Lebedev. “Thereafter, Gross, Lebedev, and others worked to run tens of millions of dollars of ACH (Automated Clearing House) transactions through the credit union without adequate controls, thus putting its financial condition at risk,” the indictment states. “Gross, Lebedev...and their co-conspirators also obstructed an examination of HOPE FCU by the National Credit Union Administration and made false statements to the NCUA in order to perpetuate Lebedev and Murgio’s control of the credit union.”
In October 2015, the NCUA placed HOPE FCU into conservatorship and liquidated it.
Sentencings are set for July 20, 2017, before the Honorable Alison J. Nathan.