[2017-12-03]The SEC's New Cyber Unit Just Filed Its First Charges Over an ICO Sc

[vit05]

A new division of the Securities and Exchange Commission dedicated to so-called “initial coin offerings” (ICOs) filed its first charges on Friday, targeting a scam that reportedly raised $15 million from thousands of investors by promising a 13-fold profit in less than a month.

In a criminal complaint filed in Brooklyn federal court, the new SEC division, known as the Cyber Unit, describes how Dominic Lacroix sold digital tokens known as “PlexCoins” as part of a purported plan “to increase access to cryptocurrency services” across the world.

The token sale was a blatant rip-off, according to the SEC, which says Lacroix, who resides in Canada, has repeatedly broken securities laws in the past.

“This first Cyber Unit case hits all of the characteristics of a full-fledged cyber scam and is exactly the kind of misconduct the unit will be pursuing,” said Robert Cohen, Chief of the Cyber Unit, in a press statement. “We acted quickly to protect retail investors from this initial coin offering’s false promises.”

http://fortune.com/2017/12/04/cryptocurrency-bitcoin-sec-ico-scam/

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[Irvinn]

If such cyber SEC departments exist in many countries, this will greatly reduce the number of future fraudulent ICOs and, I hope that the reputation of the initial coins issuance process will increase and people will invest less in this event with less risk. Now the state of affairs with the ICO is quite critical. Many topics in this forum are devoted to fraudulent ICO and many do not know how to deal with possible fraud in their conduct.

[kueyen]

This is a delicate issue. There are a lot of scammers who try to pull off fake ICOs and everybody knows that, but what is important here is to crack down on the scammers without giving a bad name to ICOs, because they are doing good things as well. It's going to be interesting to see how this one plays out.