A Polish fintech entrepreneur suspected of a $30 million fraud has been arrested in the U.S.
Marcin Pioro, a Polish entrepreneur and CEO of a fintech company, has been arrested in Missouri; Polish authorities suspect him of large-scale fraud and money laundering.
According to the investigation, client losses could exceed $30 million, reports Ozarksfirst.
The 45-year-old Pioro was arrested in Fort Leonard Wood. He is currently being held at the Cristi County Sheriff’s Office. Poland is seeking his extradition under an intergovernmental treaty with the United States.
Federal documents state that since 2010, Pioro has headed the online currency exchange platform Cinkciarz.pl and has also been associated with the companies Conotoxia and Conotoxia Holding.
According to the Polish prosecutor’s office, between 2020 and December 2024, customers were misled into depositing funds into mobile currency wallets under the guarantee that the money would be available for exchange or withdrawal. However, as the investigation claims, customer funds were used to finance other companies within the group, as well as to cover previous obligations.
At least 2,396 affected customers have been identified so far, and the total amount of losses is estimated at $30.1 million across 16 currencies. Polish law enforcement officials report that they have received approximately 7,000 complaints from citizens and interviewed at least 900 witnesses.
Problems at the company began to surface as early as the summer of 2024, when customers started complaining about delays in currency transactions. In October 2024, the Polish financial regulator revoked Conotoxia’s license to provide payment services.
Despite this, according to the prosecutor’s office, the platform continued to accept funds from customers, even though it no longer had sufficient financial resources to conduct transactions. The case files indicate that thousands of transactions were never executed.
Investigators also believe that after the regulator’s intervention, Pioro may have transferred funds to personal accounts and accounts of foreign companies. Specifically, this involves transfers of hundreds of thousands of dollars to accounts in the U.S.
Separately, Polish authorities claim that the businessman attempted to conceal assets by transferring real estate and corporate rights to relatives and a family foundation.
According to the investigation, Pioro left Poland in October 2024 and entered the U.S. in early 2025. In July 2025, a Polish court issued an arrest warrant for him, after which an international extradition warrant was issued.
As a reminder, earlier, founders, investors, operators, and ecosystem developers of fintech companies from across Europe gathered in Barcelona for a fintech summit organized by the British fintech meetup community in partnership with the fintech infrastructure platform Sends as a co-organizer of the event.
The updated forecast for 2026–2027 shows a clear trajectory for the development of financial technologies: finance is becoming AI-native (designed around AI), settlements are shifting to real-time mode, and assets are gradually migrating to tokenized platforms. After several years of declining investment, the global fintech funding market is showing signs of recovery: total investment rose from $95.5 billion in 2024 to $116 billion in 2025, with digital assets and AI-fintech solutions attracting the most attention from investors.
