Ex-Deutsche Bank Investment Banker Gets 3 Years for Fraud
(Bloomberg) — A former Deutsche Bank AG investment banker was ordered to spend more than three years behind bars for running a Ponzi-like scheme in which he promised investors “guaranteed” returns in cryptocurrency.
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Rashawn Russell, 28, was sentenced Thursday in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, to 41 months in prison. He was also ordered to pay $1.5 million in restitution to his victims.
Russell pleaded guilty in September to fraud charges. According to prosecutors, he started raising money from friends, former college classmates and co-workers in November 2020, telling them he would invest their money in digital assets. He guaranteed some of his investors a 25% return and suggested to others they could make as much as 100%.
Some of the money Russell raised was used to repay earlier investors while much was also used for personal expenses and gambling. The scheme continued until August 2022, the government said, and he was arrested in April 2023.
Russell was also charged over a separate fraud scheme, carried out between September 2021 and June 2023, in which he stole at least 97 credit and debit cards and at least 43 identification cards, often from gym lockers in New York and New Jersey. He used the stolen card information for unauthorized transactions, including online gambling.
Russell worked at Deutsche Bank from 2018 to 2021, most recently as an investment banker in the financial institutions group.
He joined the bank after attending Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s BrokerCheck. He was also previously a summer intern at the bank as well as at JPMorgan Chase & Co.
The case is US v. Russell, 23-cr-152, US District Court, Eastern District of New York (Brooklyn).
(Updates with further details in fifth paragraph)
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