Mango Markets Exploiter Gets 4 Years for 1.3K Child-Exploitation Images

Mango Markets exploiter Avraham “Avi” Eisenberg was sentenced to over four years in federal prison for allegedly possessing child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in the Southern District of New York on Thursday.

According to court documents, Eisenberg pleaded guilty to allegedly possessing nearly 1,300 images and videos of child sexual abuse that he downloaded from 2017 to 2022.

The disturbing content was discovered when Eisenberg was arrested on criminal charges tied to the Mango Markets exploit in December 2022.

“Those materials included images and videos involving toddlers, as well as depictions of sadistic violence and masochism against children,” U.S. federal prosecutors noted in a recent court document.

News of Eisenberg’s sentencing comes nearly one year after the one-time crypto con man was found guilty by a federal jury for allegedly committing commodities fraud, commodities market manipulation, and wire fraud in connection with defrauding Mango Markets.

In October 2022, Eisenberg manipulated the MNGO token by driving its price up artificially, with the cryptocurrency surging by over 1000% in just one hour.

He was then able to use collateral from the fraudulent trades to effectively steal over $110 million of digital assets, causing the MNGO to crash by 50%.

Eisenberg has maintained his innocence, arguing that he had engaged in a “legal trading strategy” and “had nothing to hide.”

“Mango Markets was a burgeoning cryptocurrency platform, with a significant number of users, who put assets onto the platform looking to make a return through lawful means,” U.S. prosecutors said. “The defendant saw that as an opportunity for exploitation.”

Eisenberg is facing up to two decades behind bars and is set to be sentenced on July 29. He is currently housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York, the prison that infamously held FTX fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried following the crypto exchange’s $8 billion collapse.

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