Mango Markets Exploiter Avi Eisenberg Gets 4+ Years—But Not for Crypto Crimes
DeFi’s most infamous arbitrageur just got locked up—for entirely unexpected reasons. Avi Eisenberg, who manipulated Mango Markets out of $110M in 2022, was sentenced to prison this week. The charge? Child pornography, not crypto fraud.
From Yield Farming to Jail Time
The same aggressive tactics Eisenberg used to drain Mango’s treasury—exploiting oracle pricing—didn’t factor into this conviction. Instead, authorities uncovered illicit materials during their crypto investigation. Talk about a rug pull on his own future.
Crypto’s Unwanted Spotlight
Yet another black eye for DeFi as regulators sharpen their knives. Eisenberg’s case proves they don’t need new laws to jail crypto figures—just old-fashioned detective work. Meanwhile, Mango’s creditors are still waiting on that $47M repayment plan. Priorities, right?
Presentence filings
In their sentencing submission to the court, prosecutors asked for Eisenberg to serve between 6.5 and 8 years in prison, stressing the seriousness of his offenses. Though Eisenberg has maintained that his crypto trading actions on Mango Markets were “compliant” with the protocol and thus didn’t break the law (an argument a jury clearly did not buy), prosecutors say Eisenberg was well aware that what he was doing was a crime. Before his Mango Markets heist, he’d filed suit against someone else for crypto-related market manipulation, and fled the country for Israel once his identity as the attacker was unveiled.
Prosecutors also detailed Eisenberg’s child sexual abuse material charges, telling the judge that between 2017 and 2022, he downloaded 1,274 sexually-explicit images and videos of children — including toddlers and two-month-old infants — as well as “depictions of sadistic violence and masochism against children.”
In their own sentencing submission to the court, Eisenberg and his lawyers attempted to blame his strict religious upbringing and his lifelong “struggles to conform to social norms” for his crimes, calling him a “fundamentally decent person” and detailing his challenges adapting to the “daily horrors” of life in jail.
