A Las Vegas businessman has been convicted in a EUR 21 million crypto Ponzi scheme that promised investors returns generated by an artificial intelligence supercomputer used for cryptocurrency mining. A Nevada court found Brent Kovar guilty of 11 counts of wire fraud, two counts of mail fraud, and two counts of money laundering, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Kovar defrauded more than EUR 21 million from hundreds of investors through his company, Profit Connect. He marketed the operation as a mining venture powered by an AI supercomputer, offering a fixed return of 15% to 30% APR along with a 100% money-back guarantee. In reality, the payouts to early participants came only from the deposits of newer investors, and the company generated no actual profit.
How the Fraud Worked
Kovar targeted roughly 400 investors, telling them Profit Connect held cryptocurrency reserves worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The company actually held nothing. It could not cover the interest payments it advertised and had no means to honor its guarantee and return investors’ cash.
According to the Department of Justice, Kovar “used investor money to operate Profit Connect, to buy gifts for employees, to buy a house for himself, and to repay investors as if those repayments came from mining cryptocurrency and verifying cryptocurrency transactions.”
Profit Connect operated from 2017 to 2021, a period that coincided with Bitcoin’s first major rally, when the cryptocurrency topped EUR 16,282 in December 2017. That surge, paired with buzzwords like AI and “supercomputer,” helped convince investors they were funding a breakthrough that would reshape finance. It remains unclear whether the lost funds will ever be recovered. Kovar faces a maximum sentence of 280 years in prison.
A Familiar Pattern in Crypto Scams
The case echoes earlier cryptocurrency frauds. BitConnect, which launched around 2017, offered comparable guaranteed returns until 2018. Rather than trading the deposited money as promised, the operation funneled funds into private digital wallet addresses, costing retail investors roughly EUR 2 billion.
An even larger case emerged in China, where a Ponzi-scheme operator collected EUR 5 billion from victims between 2014 and 2017 and converted the money into 61,000 Bitcoin. Although she has been arrested, the seized cryptocurrency remains in limbo, leaving it uncertain whether her victims will ever be repaid.
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