Instagram star ‘Jay Mazini’ pleads guilty to Bitcoin scam in NYC

An Instagram personality known for giving out money to strangers in New York pleaded guilty Wednesday to running a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme and Bitcoin fraud.

Jebara Igbara, who amassed nearly a million followers as Jay Mazini, pleaded guilty in federal court in Brooklyn and could face a possible 10-year prison sentence as part of the deal.

Igbara, 27, built his influence online by posting videos showing him handing out money to people in line at grocery stores, working at a fast-food restaurant in Queens, and to a woman he met at an airport who lost her purse his, according to a criminal complaint.

“By posting such videos, Igbara created a public persona of himself as a person of considerable means,” the complaint states.

Igbara admitted to using his company, Halal Capital, to run a Ponzi scheme between 2019 and 2021, taking cash from clients but never investing their money. Instead, he paid for his personal expenses, and used the money to run Bitcoin scams

In that scheme, he offered to buy Bitcoin, which increased in value in 2021, for above market value, and promised to transfer his followers government-backed money in exchange for the cryptocurrency.

Between January and March 2021, Igbara offered to pay his followers $52,000 for one Bitcoin, which at the time had a market value of around $47,000. But Igbara never fully paid the Bitcoin sellers he found on Instagram — and sent them fake wire transfers, investigators found.

“While I received the Bitcoin, I did not pay for it,” Igbara said in a prepared statement to Magistrate Judge Peggy Kuo on Wednesday morning.

He agreed to pay one of his followers $2.56 million for 50 Bitcoins – but the seller never received more than $500,000 from him.

He used some of the money from the Halal investors to partially pay off his victims in the Bitcoin scheme, and used the proceeds from the Bitcoin scheme to keep his Halal investors in check.

“Unfortunately, I’m human at the end of the day,” Igbara told the judge. “I have a conscience… So about the Halal Capital scheme, I took the fund and paid off, it was just from A to B.”

Igbara pleaded guilty to wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering. Under his sentencing agreement, Igbara will likely face 97 to 121 months in prison, although his top charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years behind bars.

He has also agreed to forfeit more than $10 million in property before he is sentenced, and pay an additional $5 million in restitution and $500,000 in fines.

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“You will be required to pay the full amount of each victim’s loss,” Kuo said.

There is more, unrelated prison time in Igbara’s future.

The Edgewater, NJ resident pleaded guilty in March to kidnapping in New Jersey in exchange for a five-year prison sentence in a plot to beat up a rival on social media and threaten him with a machete, according to NorthJersey.com.

Court documents in New Jersey describe the details of the kidnapping. On March 15, 2021, Igbara addressed an online critic, who accused him of running a scam, and asked the man to “go for coffee to talk it out.”

After the victim got into Igbara’s Range Rover, he found himself surrounded by the influencer and two others. He tried to flee but was chased, beaten, stripped, threatened with a machete and ordered to remove negative comments on social media or a video of the encounter would be posted online.

His federal prison sentence will run concurrently with the time he serves in New Jersey.