저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
제이미 다이먼이 비트코인을 사기라 비판했지만, 체이스은행이 Goliath Ventures 계좌를 통해 2,000여 명 투자자로부터 모인 약 3억~4억 달러 규모의 폰지 사기 자금 흐름을 방치·지원했다는 주장. 실제 투자 풀에는 100만 달러만 들어갔고 나머지는 생활비와 정치 후원에 쓰였다. 체이스는 코인베이스 파트너 관계로 수수료 이익을 얻었고, 집단소송이 은행의 컴플라이언스 책임을 묻고 있다.
다듬은 글
September 2017, Jamie Dimon stands on a Barclays stage and calls Bitcoin a fraud. He promises to fire any Chase trader caught touching it in a second. Five years later, his bank is quietly servicing a corporate checking account controlled by a 34-year-old former In-N-Out Burger employee. His name is Christopher Alexander Delgado.
The account ends in 0305. Over the next 30 months, $253 million in retail investor money will flow through that single account. Retirement savings, liquidated 401Ks, IRAs cashed out by people who'd never heard of decentralized finance. And Chase, the bank whose CEO had spent years calling crypto a Ponzi scheme for sex traffickers and terrorists, processed every single wire without, according to a federal class action, asking a single question.
The company was called Goliath Ventures. It pitched itself as a sophisticated crypto fund, specifically a liquidity provider, meaning, in the legitimate version, a firm that supplies digital assets to decentralized exchanges and earns a slice of every trade. Goliath promised monthly returns of 3 to 8%.
That's 48% a year, guaranteed. Delgado had no finance background. Eight years at In-N-Out, a failed 2022 run for Orange County Commissioner he funded with $111,500 of his own money. He came in third. By then, he'd already rebranded his shell company, Gen Z Venture Firm, into Goliath Ventures. And the money started moving.
Between January 2023 and June 2025, Goliath would defraud more than 2,000 investors Many wiring funds straight into Chase account 0305. Each one signed something called a joint venture agreement, not a securities contract, a joint venture. Those agreements were drafted by Alston & Bird, a prestigious national law firm.
A federal class action filed March 4th, 2026, alleges the structure was deliberately designed to dodge SEC registration. Call it a partnership and you don't have to register a security. Investors believed they were partners in a crypto trading firm. Legally, they were unregistered securities buyers signing away their protections.
The money hit Chase, then moved to Coinbase. $123 million in transfers from a single corporate checking account to a single crypto exchange. Delgado told investors that money was being deployed into liquidity pools, earning yield on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDC. Out of $328 million collected, exactly $1 million ever touched an actual liquidity pool.
99.7% of the money was never invested anywhere. It was a Ponzi, classic structure, new investor cash paying old investor returns. The rest funded Delgado's life. In September 2025, he closed on an $8.5 million mansion in Windermere's Isleworth, the gated enclave where Tiger Woods used to live. 11 luxury vehicles, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Ferraris, $2.5 million in cars alone.
Five Florida properties, $17 million total. $25,000 to the Republican Party of Florida, $23,500 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, $11,500 to Donald Trump's fundraising operation, and lavish James Bond-themed company parties. Here's the part that should have stopped all of it. Under the Bank Secrecy Act, every US bank has a legal duty to know its customers.
It's called customer due diligence. You build a profile of what's normal for an account. When activity deviates dramatically, you file a suspicious activity report with FinCEN. That's the law, not a suggestion. The steel complaint lists the red flags Chase allegedly ignored. They are not subtle. Red flag one, massive circular transfers.
New deposits going out within days, then coming back as returns to other depositors. No real revenue, ever. Red flag two, rapid cycling. Hundreds of millions flowing through, but the daily balance stayed near zero. Money entered and left within 24 to 48 hours. Red flag three, round number wires. $100,000, $500,000.
Repeating, no invoices, no payroll, no vendors, nothing that looks like an actual business. Red flag four, commingling. On July 30th, 2025, $500,000 went straight from the corporate checking account to a title company to buy Delgado's personal mansion. While Diamond was telling Congress that crypto's only real uses were sex traffickers, tax evasion, money laundering, and terrorists, his bank was the primary financial infrastructure for a crypto money laundering operation.
Why? The Steel complaint puts it plainly, Chase earned substantial fees on every transfer, and Chase happens to be Coinbase's primary fiat banking partner. The pipeline from Chase to Coinbase was wide, fast, and already greased. A standard business checking account became, in effect, an unregulated crypto clearinghouse.
Whether Chase ever filed a suspicious activity report on account 0305, the public will never know. By law, those filings are secret. In May 2025, Delgado got nervous. He started moving operations to Bank of America. The complaint alleges he believed Chase was about to close his accounts. Account 9136, same playbook.
$75 million in, $42 million wired to Coinbase. Same red flags, different bank. In September 2025, a financial blogger named Danny De Heck started publicly calling Goliath a Ponzi. Goliath threatened to sue him. Then federal agents started interviewing witnesses. The threat quietly disappeared. November 2025, new investor cash dried up.
Goliath stopped paying monthly distributions. The math caught up. February 20th, 2026, IRS Criminal Investigation and Homeland Security file a federal complaint, wire fraud, money laundering. February 24th, Delgado was arrested, released on a $1 million bond, house arrest, at the Isleworth mansion. He faces up to 30 years, but on March 10th, an investor named Robbie Allen Steel filed a class action in the Northern District of California, not against Delgado, against Chase.
Steel had liquidated his entire retirement account, wired it to account 0305, watched it vanish. The case is in front of Judge Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr. His ruling on Chase's motion to dismiss will determine whether banks can be held civilly liable when their compliance systems waved fraud through. If that sounds familiar, it should.
In 2014, J.P. Morgan paid $1.7 billion in civil forfeiture and a $350 million OCC penalty for ignoring red flags on Bernard Madoff's accounts for two decades. The bank promised to overhaul its compliance. 12 years and $2 billion in penalties later, here's account 0305. The lawsuit against Alston & Bird is the parallel front, the legal architecture that disguised securities as joint ventures.
A court-appointed receiver, Michael Budwick, has filed Chapter 11 on both Goliath entities and is hunting the money, some of which is allegedly sitting in Dubai accounts. In May 2026, the DOJ filed forfeiture papers on seven properties and 11 vehicles and upgraded the total fraud figure from $328 million to at least $400 million.
Over 1,000 victims confirmed. Here's the part that matters beyond Goliath. For years, regulators have chased crypto exchanges, offshore shells, and DeFi protocols. But, a $400 million crypto fraud cannot exist without a fiat on-ramp, and the on-ramp is a regular checking account at a regular bank, the institution most retail investors trust to keep their money safe.
Diamond called Bitcoin a fraud from a stage, while his bank, for $123 million in transfers and an unknown sum in fees, served as the back office for one. The mansion in Isleworth is empty now. Federal agents have the keys. Account 0305 is closed, but somewhere tonight, on a banking dashboard you'll never see, another account is doing exactly what 0305 did. And the alert, if it fires at all, is blinking in a room with no one
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