Federal jury in Fort Worth convicts CEO of fraud in crypto mining Ponzi scheme
Caleb Ward was getting married, and in the fall of 2022 went to Las Vegas for the wedding with Jeremy McNutt, with whom Ward had founded a bitcoin mining company that had a primary location in Fort Worth.
Ward, the chief executive at Geosyn, which had a facility in Springtown, took $10,000 on the trip. McNutt, the company’s chief operating officer, used a credit card to run up $17,000 in nightclub bills in one night.
The Las Vegas expenditures, though grand, would be fine had they not been made using investor funds, according to federal law enforcement authorities.
Three months before the wedding, Ward, Jeremy McNutt and Jared McNutt, Geosyn’s sales manager, took a trip to Miami for a conference. In the evenings, they piled up thousands of dollars in restaurant and nightclub charges on company credit cards, according to the government’s description of the allegations contained in a criminal complaint.
In August 2022, Ward and Jeremy McNutt took a dozen of their relatives to Disney World, charging the expenses to company credit cards, according to the FBI. They used client funds to pay the credit card bills instead of purchasing bitcoin mining machines for clients as promised.
In September, Jeremy McNutt used a company credit card to buy $7,000 worth of guns for himself and then tried to cover it up by lying to a company employee who questioned the purchase, according to the criminal complaint. Jeremy McNutt earlier that year spent $15,000 on luxury watches.
A jury in U.S. District Court in Fort Worth last week convicted Ward of a multi-million-dollar cryptocurrency mining investment fraud that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in North Texas said victimized dozens of clients across the United States.
After a six-day trial, the jury found Ward, 41, guilty on all counts on which he was indicted in May 2025, including one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and three counts of wire fraud.
Ward solicited funds from people who were promised that their money would be used to purchase and host bitcoin mining machines, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Ward and his company promised clients that he had locked in electricity rates as low as 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Ward also promised clients that specific mining machines would be purchased and installed on the clients’ behalf and that clients’ machines were “up and running” and actively mining bitcoin at various facilities.
Other defendants made plea deals
Jeremy and Jared McNutt were also indicted, entered into a plea agreement with the government and testified at Ward’s trial.
Despite Ward’s assurances, many clients never received the machines they paid for, and others later learned that their machines were never powered on or connected as represented, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Ward and the McNutts sent some clients photos of mining machines that belonged to other customers, and in several instances provided serial numbers tied to completely different miners to create the false impression that their equipment had been purchased, delivered and installed, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Clients wired about $4.5 million to Geosyn between November 2021 and January 2023, according to a financial analysis presented at trial. Instead of using the funds strictly for the purchase and hosting of mining equipment as promised, Ward transferred tens of thousands of dollars to accounts in his own name and used client funds to pay prior investors in a manner consistent with a Ponzi-style scheme, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Ward’s sentencing hearing is set for March 12. The maximum prison term is 20 years on each count.
Ward was taken to custody when the jury found him guilty. He will not spend Thanksgiving with his daughters, ages 9 and 11, as he had hoped.
“Mr. Ward simply wishes to remain at his mother’s home in Mansfield for the next few months and see his young daughters outside of a detention center setting before sentencing,” defense attorney Frank Sellers wrote in a motion seeking his client’s release pending sentencing.
U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, who presided at the trial, on Monday denied the motion.
During Ward’s trial, Jeremy McNutt received in the mail from Geosyntek Holdings Inc, an IRS form reflecting that McNutt had received $737,785 in dividends in 2022, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
“Whatever happened in 2022 was not that — McNutt receiving dividends,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Chad Meacham wrote in the government’s response to Ward’s motion seeking release. “The filing of potential false statements with the IRS as well as attempting to harass a witness for the government show Ward should not be released because he engaged in conduct such as this while already released on conditions.”
“Worse for Ward, he likely perjured himself at trial by claiming that Jeremy McNutt was in charge of the finances for Geosyn and that he, Ward, did not know about all of McNutt’s expenditures because McNutt was in charge of the books and Ward trusted him,” Meacham wrote.
“That claim was not truthful based upon the other evidence before the jury and based upon the investigation conducted into the fraud at Geosyn,” Meacham wrote.
Sellers did not respond to an inquiry from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
