Former CEO of Digitex Futures Exchange, Adam Todd, has entered a guilty plea in federal court related to the failure to establish an Anti-Money Laundering (AML) program at the company. The plea follows Todd’s indictment by U.S. authorities in February on charges of violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, Todd admitted to causing Digitex to violate the Bank Secrecy Act willfully. The indictment alleges that Todd operated an unregistered futures platform for U.S. customers from 2018 to 2022 without implementing and maintaining AML and Know Your Customer (KYC) programs.
Potential consequences for Todd include a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. This development comes after former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to similar charges in another federal district in November 2023 and received a four-month prison sentence in April.
No date has been set for Todd’s sentencing hearing. Todd had resigned as CEO of Digitex in October 2022 and has since been employed as the lead developer at Digitex Games, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In 2020, Todd announced that Digitex would not require KYC identity verification following a data breach at the exchange, where a former employee reportedly stole users’ passport and driver’s license information. Digitex claimed to have blocked U.S. IPs and requested users to confirm they were not based in the United States at that time. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed a lawsuit against Todd and Digitex in 2022, resulting in a judgment the following year for $16 million in disgorgement and penalties.
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