A cryptocurrency fraud suspect tampered with his ankle monitoring bracelet and escaped from the surveillance site

BlockBeats news, on October 12, Horst Jicha, former CEO of Dubai cryptocurrency foreign exchange trading platform USI-Tech, who was suspected of cryptocurrency fraud and Ponzi scheme, was sentenced to home detention in New York and was required to pay a $5 million bail, guaranteed by his partner and children, but he has fled.

New York prosecutors said that the man who was under home detention for allegedly participating in a $180 million cryptocurrency fraud scheme appeared to have fled after tampering with his ankle monitoring bracelet. According to court documents on October 10, Horst Jicha, former CEO of USI-Tech, allegedly "tampered with his ankle bracelet" on October 4 and "fleeing in violation of pretrial conditions."

The court's pretrial services department notified the government about 12 hours after Jicha's bracelet stopped working, and the government immediately applied for an arrest warrant for the fugitive. Jicha, a German national, was arrested on December 23, 2023, in Miami, Florida, where he was planning to vacation for the first time since fleeing the country in 2018 and receiving a cease-and-desist order from U.S. authorities.

John Marzulli, a spokesman for the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Office, told CNBC that "there is a very active investigation underway to catch him."