Estonian court refuses to extradite two co-founders suspected of defrauding Hashflare to the United States

The two co-founders of Bitcoin cloud mining company Hashflare, Ivan Turogin and Sergei Potapenko, who face 18 charges of fraud and money laundering, have successfully appealed their extradition to the United States from Estonia, the Estonian Tallinn Circuit Court said in a statement. On November 29, it overturned a lower court order denying their extradition to the United States. Their defense presented "evidence concerning conditions of detention in the United States" that the government failed to consider and claimed there were procedural irregularities in issuing the extradition order. In overturning the orders, the Circuit Court cited the practice of the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, HashFlare, which operated from 2015 to 2019, was a Ponzi scheme in which hundreds of thousands of victims paid a total of $575 million. The company claimed to lease hash power for cryptocurrency mining and also encouraged investment in a fake bank. If convicted in the United States, Ivan Turogin and Sergei Potapenko face up to 20 years in prison each. (Cointelegraph)