Stefan Qin says he committed $90M crypto fraud to spite school bullies

• Stefan Qin says his role in a $90 million crypto Ponzi scheme was the product of high school bullying, and the pressures he felt from his heritage.
• In an interview, he said he felt immense pressure to “lie” to investors, to meet expectations.
• Over the weekend, Qin began a 7-and-a-half year stint in a US federal prison for one count of securities fraud.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

A former cryptocurrency hedge fund manager who was sentenced to seven and a half years in a US federal prison last year says he lied about his investors’ returns to avoid falling short of their expectations, which he said he was afraid would expose him to bullying. 

In an interview with a little-known media company posted to YouTube on Friday, Canberra-born crypto fraudster Stefan Qin said his role in the swindling of $US90 million from Australian and US investors between 2017 and 2020 was the result of years of bullying through high school, and the pressures he felt from his Asian heritage to succeed.

“I felt immense pressure to inflate the returns and to just lie because I needed to match the expectations. They have this image in their head of this wunderkind who could make them a lot of money, and unless I met that image, I was a failure, right?,” Qin said. 

“And maybe I’d go…