A River North cybersecurity firm seems to have started another business in the wake of a scandal involving two former employees and an associate who extorted tens of millions of dollars from customers.
The parent company of DigitalMint created a new website under Chaintrax Cyber, offering cybersecurity services to businesses, including negotiating ransomware cryptocurrency settlements, threat response and decryption.
Documents filed Aug. 27 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show Chaintrax applied for a new trademark with the agency, paying application fees of $550, according to a filing made under parent company Red Leaf Chicago.
New York law firm Pryor Cashman and attorney Dyan Finguerra-DuCharme were listed as legal representatives.
The law firm declined to comment. Finguerra-DuCharme didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The trademark application was filed less than two months after former DigitalMint employee Angelo Martino was sentenced to nearly six years in federal prison for his role in extorting multiple victims in 2023. The 41-year-old Florida resident pled guilty in April to one count of conspiring to interfere with interstate commerce through extortion, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Martino conspired with former DigitalMint employee Kevin Tyler Martin and Ryan Clifford Goldberg, who worked for Israeli firm Sygnia Cybersecurity Services, according to prosecutors.
Martin, a 36-year-old Texas resident, and Goldberg, a 41-year-old Georgia resident, were sentenced in May to 48 months in prison.
Martino’s role in the scheme was to identify victims, extract data from their computers and lock their networks, while Goldberg identified computer weaknesses and gained access to victims’ networks. The trio would order companies to pay ransoms in exchange for a key to unlock encrypted data they hacked, promising not to publish the victims’ stolen data, prosecutors said.
The conspirators extorted more than $75 million from four companies and a nonprofit that Martino represented as a negotiator on behalf of DigitalMint, the Sun-Times previously reported.
Martino and Martin were fired by DigitalMint. Goldberg no longer works for Sygnia.
A hearing to determine the amount of restitution Martino will be ordered to pay was rescheduled from Sept. 17 to Nov. 12, the Justice Department said.
It’s unclear if DigitalMint has plans to rebrand as Chaintrax. The companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Both firms are registered with the Illinois Secretary of State, have separate websites and contact information but offer similar services under the same executive team.
Marc Jason Grens serves as co-founder and president at both companies, while Jonathan Solomon is co-founder and CEO. Don Wyper is listed as chief operating officer. Chaintrax Technology Director Daniel Smith doesn’t appear on DigitalMint’s leadership team.
When there’s an incident within a company, leadership and culture take on added importance, according to Lynda Carlisle, partner at CS-Effect, a West Loop agency that handles crisis communications and related issues for businesses.
“If a brand’s reputation has been challenged, a discerning leader will look at the culture because the problems left could be carried over,” she said. “People are willing to try a new product or service. But if trust is broken, that sets off a different set of alarms that threatens client loyalty.”
Doyle Albee, who led communications for a Colorado technology company in the mid-1990s after its CEO went to prison for fraud, said reputational damage could last for years. In that scandal, whistleblowers tipped off local newspapers that the company inflated inventory sales by stuffing hard drives with bricks, recalling them for defects then reselling them to different customers.
“MiniScribe is still known here in Colorado as the company that shipped bricks,” said Albee, co-founder and managing director of public relations firm Prolexity in Colorado. “While the name change came from Maxtor’s acquisition of MiniScribe rather than just a rebrand, the new name changed the sign on the building. It doesn’t immediately change what shows up when people search, and it doesn’t erase the mental association for customers who were burned.”
DigitalMint got its start in 2014 and became one of the largest bitcoin ATM operators in the country, with roughly 1,400 locations in dozens of states. But controversy quickly followed.
Bitcoin ATMs are often used by drug dealers and traffickers to launder money, as bitcoin can be hard to trace. And fraudsters often direct victims to send them crypto by using the ATMs to convert cash, officials say.
By 2016, Grens said the company found most of their customers making large crypto purchases were scam victims.
Grens, a Chicago native, ultimately shuttered the ATM business in 2024 — re-emerging DigitalMint as a cybersecurity consultancy and crypto payment service provider.
“I don’t want to build something dirty,” he told the Sun-Times in 2025 on why he left the ATM business.
Michael Shmarak, who teaches public relations at Northwestern University and is president of Northbrook PR firm Poetiq, said leadership should clearly differentiate the business entities.
“If DigitalMint is ceasing operations and sunsetting, then leadership needs to rip the Band-Aid off internally and externally to share why the company is changing trajectory,” he said. “Otherwise, customers and other stakeholders will be confused, leading to lost brand equity that competition will pounce upon.”