New Fraudulent ICO Charged For $30 Million Raise By US SEC

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has recently charged a group of criminals raising over $30 million through a new fraudulent initial coin offering (ICO). According to a January 12 press release which is in the Bitcoin scams news now, the SEC charged and convicted Boaz Manor, his business associate and two companies including CG Blockchain Inc. and BCT Inc. SEZC with violating the antifraud and securities registration provisions of the federal laws.

Meanwhile, Manor is a dual citizen of Canada and Israel. Along with his other partners, he managed to raise more than $30 million in a new fraudulent ICO, conducted with the objective to launch hedge funds testing technology to record transactions on blockchain.

The full complaint by the SEC reads that between August 2017 and September 2018, the defendants promoted and sold digital asset securities in an attempt to develop technologies for hedge funds. Manor misrepresented himself as “Shaun MacDonald” and talked about himself as an employee of his New Jersey-based associate Edith Pardo, an Israeli citizen who allegedly ran the company.

At the time, the defendants said that they possessed 20 hedge funds testing technology to record transactions on blockchain. However, the cryptonews show that they only sent a prototype to a number of funds which did not use it.

The chief of the SEC’s Market Abuse Unit commented on the new fraudulent ICO case and said:

“As alleged in our complaint, Manor’s brazen scheme to conceal his identity and criminal history deprived investors of essential information and allowed defendants to take over $30 million from investors’ pockets.”

Also, today we saw that the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey announced criminal charges against Manor and Pardo in a parallel action. The SEC now seeks disgorgement of illegally obtained profits plus interest, penalties and injunctive relief as well as barring Manor and Pardo from acting as officers or directors of public companies and from participating in future securities offerings.

Meanwhile, history shows that Manor received a four-year prison sentence in Canada in 2012 for siphoning $106 million from a Toronto-based hedge fund that he co-founded. The Canadian fund had $800 million in assets under management at its peak from 26,000 different investors.