A cease-and-desist letter sent in April 2024 by Indian software company Maxtra Technologies appears, at first glance, to be a routine legal dispute over reporting. The document, addressed to OffshoreAlert editor David Marchand, demanded that coverage of a U.S. bankruptcy complaint involving Mirror Trading International (MTI) and Sabina Romanowska be stopped. But the letter becomes considerably more significant when read against court findings and regulatory records documenting the collapse of MTI, one of the largest cryptocurrency investment schemes to come under international enforcement scrutiny.
The letter was sent on April 30, 2024, on Maxtra Technologies letterhead and identified the company as acting “on legal behalf” of MTI. It specifically referred to a U.S. Bankruptcy Court complaint seeking approximately $454,000 in alleged preferential transfers from Romanowska. Maxtra said the reporting contained “inaccuracies and misrepresentations,” asserted that MTI was not involved in fraudulent or illegal activity, and threatened legal action for defamation and interference with legal proceedings if OffshoreAlert continued publishing material about the case.
That assertion sits uneasily beside findings from regulators and courts. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged MTI and its founder and chief executive, Cornelius Johannes Steynberg, in 2022 with operating a fraudulent international multilevel-marketing scheme involving Bitcoin. According to the CFTC, MTI and Steynberg accepted at least 29,421 Bitcoin from approximately 23,000 people in the United States, with the Bitcoin valued at more than $1.733 billion at the end of the relevant period. The agency alleged that the defendants misappropriated the Bitcoin rather than operating the legitimate foreign-exchange trading operation they had represented to investors.
The CFTC case did not end with an accusation alone. In April 2023, a federal court entered a default judgment against Steynberg, finding him liable for fraud involving retail foreign-exchange transactions, fraud by an associated person of a commodity pool operator, registration violations and failures to comply with commodity-pool regulations. The judgment ordered him to pay more than $3.4 billion. Steynberg did not defend the CFTC case, and the judgment was therefore entered by default rather than after a contested trial in which he presented a defence.
MTI itself subsequently faced a separate judgment. In September 2023, the CFTC announced a consent order against the company requiring more than $1.7 billion in restitution to victims and imposing permanent prohibitions on its participation in CFTC-regulated markets. The order described MTI as a company in liquidation in South Africa.
South African proceedings provide an even broader picture. The Financial Sector Conduct Authority warned in August 2020 that MTI was not licensed to conduct the financial services it appeared to be offering. The regulator said MTI claimed to have more than R2.9 billion in client funds but that it could not conclusively confirm that those funds existed. It also questioned MTI’s claimed average returns of approximately 10% a month and noted that the broker FX Choice had blocked MTI’s account because of compliance concerns.
MTI was placed into provisional liquidation in December 2020 and received a final liquidation order in June 2021. In April 2023, the Western Cape High Court went further, declaring MTI’s business model an unlawful pyramid/Ponzi-type scheme and declaring the agreements between MTI and its investors unlawful and void from the outset. The judgment became a central foundation for the liquidators’ subsequent attempts to recover money from people who had withdrawn more from MTI than they had deposited.
This is where Maxtra Technologies enters the story in a way that is more substantial than the 2024 cease-and-desist letter alone. A 2026 judgment of the High Court of England and Wales records evidence from MTI’s liquidators concerning the company’s “back-office” database. According to that evidence, MTI’s back-office system, used to record and manage Bitcoin transactions, was operated by Maxtra Technologies and hosted on servers in India. After the liquidators gained access to the database in May 2021, forensic specialists were brought in to analyse it.
The database proved crucial to the recovery effort. The liquidators told the English court that the system contained information relating to hundreds of thousands of user accounts, but that the raw data was difficult to interpret. They ultimately developed specialist software called the MTI Administrative Reporting System, or MARS, to identify users and trace transactions. The 2026 judgment records that the liquidators were pursuing approximately 7,196 respondents across 14 jurisdictions by February 2025, with the number potentially increasing.
That database connection does not, by itself, establish that Maxtra participated in MTI’s fraud. The public court material reviewed for this report does not show a criminal conviction or regulatory finding against Maxtra Technologies for participating in the scheme. Nor does it establish that Maxtra’s directors knew how MTI would use the software or that they shared in Steynberg’s alleged misappropriation. Those distinctions matter.
What is documented is the technological relationship. Maxtra Technologies is an Indian private company incorporated in 2010. Corporate records identify Shivendra Kumar Dwivedi, Kripa Sagar Tripathi and Tushar Kant Srivastava as its current directors, with Dwivedi having served since incorporation and Tripathi joining the board in 2017. Maxtra’s own website identifies Dwivedi as its founder and director and describes him as a software-development executive with a long career in the industry.
No reliable public source located in this research establishes Dwivedi’s exact age. Public professional profiles place him in Noida and identify him as Maxtra’s founder. The company remains active and currently markets itself as an AI, software-development and digital-product engineering business, with operations advertised in India, the United States and South Africa. Its public-facing material shows that the business continues to pursue conventional software-development work.
Corporate records also connect Dwivedi and Tripathi to KST Technologies Private Limited and Mataviva Minerals Private Limited. KST Technologies is listed as struck off in one current corporate database, while Mataviva Minerals is also listed as struck off. These directorship links establish corporate associations, but they do not establish wrongdoing by those companies.
The 2024 cease-and-desist therefore represents an important piece of the story, but not proof of guilt. Maxtra’s letter expressly denied that MTI was fraudulent and threatened legal action against the publication. The subsequent regulatory and judicial record, however, reached very different conclusions about MTI itself. The CFTC obtained billions of dollars in judgments and restitution orders; South African courts declared MTI’s business model unlawful; and liquidators have pursued thousands of investors and other parties internationally in an effort to recover assets.
Steynberg himself disappeared from South Africa after MTI collapsed and was arrested in Brazil in December 2021 on an Interpol warrant. Brazilian courts later convicted him of using a forged identity document and imposed a prison sentence that was converted into a fine. He subsequently died in Brazil in April 2024. The South African National Prosecuting Authority has since confirmed that its extradition request was withdrawn after receiving an official report confirming his death.
The liquidation has not ended with Steynberg’s death. In 2026, courts in Singapore recognised MTI’s South African liquidation as a foreign main proceeding, while litigation in England continued over the liquidators’ attempts to recover Bitcoin and other assets from investors. The English High Court has a further trial scheduled in the wider recovery litigation, illustrating how far the legal consequences of MTI’s collapse have extended beyond the original scheme.
The central lesson is not that a software company should automatically be treated as responsible for the conduct of a client. It is that the technology infrastructure behind a financial scheme can become critical evidence long after the people who operated that scheme have disappeared. In MTI’s case, the database operated by Maxtra became part of the forensic trail used to identify investors, trace transactions and pursue recoveries. The most consequential questions now concern what can still be recovered for creditors and victims, how much money ultimately remains missing, and how far responsibility can legally be traced through the network of people and businesses that surrounded MTI. The paper trail has outlived the scheme itself, and the courts are still working through it.
Source:
OffshoreAlert
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