GAW Miners founder owes nearly $10 million to SEC over Bitcoin fraud

(credit: Internet Archive)

Homero Josh Garza, who founded two cryptocurrency startups, GAW Miners and ZenMiner, has been ordered to pay a final civil judgment of $9.1 million, plus $700,000 in interest.

The judgement, which was formally approved by a federal judge in Connecticut on Tuesday, comes months after Garza pled guilty to a single criminal wire fraud charge. In May 2017, as part of the same lawsuit, Garza’s companies were hit with a default judgment of more than $10 million. No representatives made any formal response to the lawsuit—Garza himself invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege.

According to the civil complaint, which was first brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission in December 2015, Garza and his companies sold more than 10,000 “investment contracts representing shares in the profits they claimed would be generated from using their purported computing power to ‘mine’ for virtual currency.”