James and Anton Peraire-Bueno are accused of fraudulently diverting $25M in crypto in 12 seconds.
After nearly three full days of deliberations, the jury said it’s “struggling” to come to a verdict.
If convicted, the MIT-educated brothers face up to 60 years in prison.
A Manhattan jury was told to keep deliberating Friday afternoon after revealing they’re “struggling” to reach a verdict in the trial of two brothers who pocketed $25 million in cryptocurrency in a 12-second transaction the feds say was fraudulent.
The weary-looking panel of five men and seven women was sent back to the jury room at 3:30 p.m. and told to continue deliberating the fate of James and Anton Peraire-Bueno.
The MIT-educated brothers, both in their 20s, are charged with wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. Each of the three charges carries a potential maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
“Remember your oath,” US District Court Judge Jessica G. L. Clarke told the jurors in sending them back to continue deliberations. Several of the jurors’ faces fell when the judge informed them that a dinner menu would be available in the jury room, emphasizing that their work was not yet done.
The jury has heard three weeks of highly complex testimony describing the brothers’ blindingly fast April 2023 maneuver, which channeled a small fortune into their cryptocurrency wallets.
In charging the brothers with fraud, prosecutors say the brothers lured and then deceived a trio of traders on the Ethereum blockchain.
Complicating the case: The transaction was accomplished entirely by “bots,” preprogrammed code that acted in milliseconds. The Peraire-Buenos’ bots’ targets? They were bots, too.
Defense lawyers told jurors the brothers’ complicated, bot-on-bot maneuver was a wildly successful “trading strategy,” fair play in the rough-and-tumble, self-policing world of Ethereum.
Prosecutors said the diversion only worked because the brothers made repeated misrepresentations — essentially programming their bots to lie. Under federal law, a defendant is guilty of wire fraud if they intentionally use misrepresentations to deceive another party in order to obtain money or property.
Earlier juror notes on Friday showed the panel striving to understand the standard of proof for determining the defendants’ state of mind at the time the maneuver was executed.
In a win for the government, the judge instructed jurors that they need not specifically find that the brothers knew their actions were illegal — only that they willfully intended to deceive.
The jury also asked on Friday for additional clarification on the meaning of “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” The judge instructed that the phrase means the evidence is so convincing that a reasonable person would not hesitate to rely and act upon it.
On Thursday, the jurors informed the court that they would be willing to work until 7:30 p.m. on Friday, if needed.
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