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The Department of Justice plans to drop charges against a Colorado man accused of a cryptocurrency scam that allegedly netted him $722 million in ill-gotten gains.
Matthew Goettsche, along with several others, was indicted in 2019 for allegedly defrauding investors with his crypto mining company, BitClub Network. He rewarded investors for recruiting new members, prosecutors said, a classic Ponzi scheme structure.
In a sharp move, the deputy attorney general’s office in Washington has ordered the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey to dismiss the case for discrimination, two people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg Law.
The first public sign that prosecutors were not pursuing it came Wednesday, when Goettsche’s attorneys filed a motion to notify the judge that they had “reached an agreement to resolve the pending charges.”
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Cryptocurrency mining machines at a facility in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Monday, December 2, 2024. (Sarah Pabst/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Getty Images)
According to people who spoke to Bloomberg Law, Goettsche put together a team of lawyers with ties to the Trump administration who could ask the DOJ for help.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the DOJ for comment.
Emily Covington, a DOJ spokeswoman, denied that the decision to drop the charges was related to “any alleged pressure from Goettsche’s attorneys,” in a statement to Bloomberg Law.
He also said that the DOJ regularly reviews pending cases and that the government is in the process of recovering “a large amount owed to investors.”
This marks a dramatic change from February, when prosecutors sent a letter to the court saying a trial was required.
US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks during a press conference at the US Department of Justice on Jan. 30, 2026, Washington, DC. (Alex Wroblewski / AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)
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“The case concerns a global fraud scheme based on false promises that hundreds of millions of dollars in victims’ investments would be used to generate returns from cryptocurrency mining,” prosecutors wrote in the letter, signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
In 2015, when BitClub Network was just getting off the ground, Goettsche allegedly said to his partners, “We built this whole model on the backs of fools,” according to the lawsuit.
Bitcoin mining is a process that requires “miners” to use computers to solve complex mathematical problems in order to be rewarded with newly minted bitcoin.
The Bitcoin logo at the cryptocurrency office in Madrid, Spain, on Saturday, June 20, 2026. (Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Getty Images)
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The BitClub Network, as others did at the time, was intended to pool investors’ money together to buy hardware and computer chips to build a better mining system. The idea was to then share the profits.
Prosecutors argued that BitClub Network falsely reported profits and misled its investors.
“The real numbers are fake,” Goettsche said in a January 2015 message to a colleague who was implicated in the lawsuits. “We’re going to slowly introduce the real numbers.”
President Donald Trump presents the GENIUS Act (Directing and Establishing the National Genius Act of the US Stablecoins Act), which includes the use of stablecoins – cryptocurrencies linked to stable assets such as the US dollar, on July 18, 2025. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images/Getty Images)
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The indictment, which charged Goettsche with conspiracy to defraud and sell unregistered securities, was reinstated during the first Trump administration, and three of Goettsche’s co-defendants pleaded guilty.
Trump’s second administration has been very crypto-friendly, and Donald Trump’s family has their own crypto ventures. The House of Representatives also passed the Transparency Act last year, the first attempt by Congress to provide a new regulatory framework for crypto.
Fox News Digital has reached out to Goettsche’s attorneys for comment.
