NEW YORK-Trevon Gross, a New Jersey pastor involved in a scheme that involved a credit union to help an illegal bitcoin exchange to evade the eye of regulators, has been sentenced after being found guilty earlier this year.
Gross, 47, was sentenced to five years in prison by U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan in Manhattan, who also ordered him to pay a $12,000 fine, U.S. prosecutors said. Gross is one of several people who have been found guilty as part of the scheme that was first uncovered in 2014 as part of the investigation of a data breach at JPMorgan Chase that involved 83 million accounts.
According to prosecutors, Gross took bribes from Florida software engineer Yuri Lebedev, who also operated the illegal bitcoin exchange Coin.mx, and from Anthony Murgio, also from Florida, including $150,000 in donations to his church, HOPE Cathedral in Jackson, New Jersey.
In exchange for the bribes, prosecutors said, Gross allowed Murgio take over HOPE Federal Credit Union in Lakewood, N.J.
“Lebedev, Murgio, and their co-conspirators took control of HOPE FCU. With Gross’ assistance, Murgio installed Lebedev and various co-conspirators on HOPE FCU’s board of directors and transferred Coin.mx’s banking operations to HOPE FCU,” said the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. “Yuri Lebedev and others at Coin.mx, an unlawful Bitcoin exchange, tricked banks into processing millions of dollars in transactions by hiding the nature of their business. When the banks caught on to their scheme, Lebedev and others bribed Trevon Gross in order to gain control of a credit union to process those transactions, undermining the credit union’s safety and solvency in the process. Despite elaborate efforts by the defendants to hide their schemes, their brazen crimes were exposed at trial. Gross and Lebedev’s criminal schemes have now landed them in federal prison.”
Lebedev has been sentenced to 16 months in prison.
Numerous others have also been found guilty and sentenced. Additional statements can be found here.