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SEC Files Charges in $11 Million Crypto Scam Which Also Involves Steven Seagal

Initial coin offerings bloomed in 2017 and 2018 as several B-listers from the entertainment world lent their support for many of them.

Today, SEC has declared that it will continue its case against those involved in a crypto project that also involves 1990s movie star Steven Seagal.

As stated by the SEC complaint filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, there are three people who operated the Start Options and Bitcoiin2GEN and persuaded small investors to get involved in this business. Those people made investments of around $11 million in cash for tokens and products that weren’t able to do what they claimed.

Kristijan Krstic was the founder, and John DeMarr was the chief marketer for Start Options, which claimed to be a platform on which you can trade and mine crypto, including Bitcoiin2Gen. This token is now considered by SEC to be a “sham.”

“DeMarr fraudulently misappropriated at least $1.8 million—nearly half of the fiat currency he raised from investors—for his own personal benefit, including car payments and personal credit card debts,” mentions the SEC complaint. “Krstic, meanwhile, received more than $9 million of investor funds in fiat currency and digital assets.”

It was reported that Krstic retired from the scheme in 2018 but without refunding any of the investors.

The third person named in the complaint is Robin Enos. SEC claims that Enos received around $12,000 from DeMarr in order to help in the marketing effort. It seems that the two maintained that B2G tokens could be mineable and tradable by April 2018, which is the same month in which Krstic decided to leave the project.

Steven Seagal received a fine from SEC in February 2020 for marketing Bitcoiin2Gen without divulging the fact that he was actually paid $157,000 in B2G tokens to do so.

Seagal was an advocate for Bitcoiin2Gen around February 2018, claiming it is a way “to empower the community by providing a decentralized P2P payment system with its own wallet, mining ecosystem and robust blockchain platform without the need of any third party.”

Naturally, all of this happened before the token was revealed to be worthless.

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