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Rabat – The Casablanca Court of Appeals confirmed on Wednesday an 18-month prison sentence for a 21-year-old Frenchman for fraud and illegal use of cryptocurrency, also ordering him to compensate victims of his fraud.
Having been incarcerated since December 2021, the defendant has almost finished his sentence, his lawyer Mohamed Aghanaj told AFP.
Trial proceedings against the Frenchman were initiated after authorities received complaints of fraud from a Frenchwoman living in Casablanca who had sold him a Ferrari car for a bitcoin payment worth 400,000 euros.
Another person accused the man of defrauding him of three luxury watches by giving him a check that was not processed due to the account not having sufficient funds.
The court ordered the man to compensate the owner of the watches to the tune of MAD 40,000 ($4,000), in addition to paying a fine of 3.4 million euros to customs authorities.
The sentence, including compensation, has been served, according to Aghanaj. “He has one month and a few days left in prison,” the lawyer said.
The young man initially settled in Morocco for a project to create a neobank in Africa, his father claimed.
Although trading cryptocurrencies is outlawed in Morocco, the country is the fastest-growing crypto market in North Africa, with ownership of such digital assets rising steadily.
Aware of cryptocurrency’s rising popularity, Morocco’s central bank Bank Al-Maghrib (BAM) said in December that it was working on introducing a draft law to regulate the crypto market in the country.
Scams and fraud also continue to be a concern for the crypto market, especially as digital spaces have seen a number of pump-and-dump schemes and fraudulent payments in recent years.
