Rodney Burton, a Miami-based crypto promoter who went by “Bitcoin Rodney” on social media, pleaded guilty on June 15 in US District Court in Maryland to conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. The charge stems from his role in the HyperFund scheme, a global wire-fraud operation that collected approximately $1.89 billion from investors between June 2020 and January 2022.
His sentencing is scheduled for July 23, 2026. He faces a maximum of five years in federal prison.
Inside the HyperFund scheme
The HyperFund platform pitched itself as a vehicle for generating outsized returns through cryptocurrency mining and related operations. The problem, according to prosecutors: none of those operations actually existed.
HyperFund didn’t limit itself to a single brand, either. The operation cycled through multiple identities, including HyperVerse and HyperCapital. Despite the crypto-adjacent branding, the scheme notably did not offer any actual cryptocurrency tokens, making it less of a crypto project and more of a traditional fraud operation wearing a blockchain costume.
