CRYPTO. ~ In a recent press release, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) stated that it would be bringing a fraud charge against cryptocurrency influencer Richard Heart in the federal court located in New York. In the case filed by the SEC, Heart is accused of purchasing luxury items for himself, including watches, sports cars, and the largest black diamond in the world, using investor cash totaling millions of dollars.
Additionally, the SEC accused Heart of publicly advertising the 2019 sale of Hex tokens in exchange for 2.3 million Ethereum (equivalent to $678 million), when in reality, this transaction was done by Heart himself with the assistance of other Hex investors. Recycling is the term for the strategy that he utilized, and it enabled him to keep control of the currency while giving the appearance that there was a substantial need for it.
Federal regulators believe that Heart raised more than one billion dollars in unregistered crypto securities through his Hex, PulseChain, and PulseX enterprises and utilized at least $12 million of the money on personal expenditures. This includes spending more than two million dollars on Rolex watches. “Heart solicited investments from individuals in the form of purchases of crypto asset securities in offers that he did not properly register. Following this, he scammed those investors by spending some of their cryptocurrency holdings on extravagant luxury goods, as stated in a press release written by Eric Werner, director of the SEC’s regional office in Fort Worth, Texas.”This action seeks to protect the investing public and hold Heart accountable for his actions,” the complaint states.
Following the announcement of the accusations, the value of Hex, a relatively obscure cryptocurrency that Heart had developed, dropped to its lowest level since 2021. Investors in Hex, PulseChain, and PulseX were urged by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to provide tips by submitting them on SEC.gov. When it came to his extravagant spending, Heart would not hesitate to show off. In a tweet from the year 2022, he can be seen posing for a picture with a “million dollars of #Lamborghini #gucci #bulgari #rolex.”
A significant portion of Heart’s life has also been documented and disseminated on the internet via his social media profiles, most notably his YouTube channel, in which he offers helpful tidbits to his audience. The most recent video posted to the account had him saying, “I think you should trust me, but if you get in the habit of trusting people like me, you’ll get the crap scammed out of you.”
On his website, Heart also makes the claim that he has assisted “thousands of people to stop gambling, trading, drinking, and playing intensive grinding video games.” It wasn’t immediately known who will represent Heart in the lawsuit, but there has been some speculation about it.
Binance and Coinbase, the world’s two largest cryptocurrency exchanges, were the targets of an investigation conducted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the course of two days at the beginning of June. The SEC is alleging that both companies violated federal securities legislation.
These cases were filed a little over six months after Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was accused of operating one of the worst financial scams in the history of the United States by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the United States Department of Justice (DOJ). Should she be found guilty, Bankman-Fried faces the possibility of serving a lengthy sentence in prison.
The newly harsh attitude the government is taking toward crypto regulation is highlighted by this crackdown. The authorities didn’t simply sue the company; they also asked for emergency permission to seize Binance US assets everywhere else in the world. This decision was taken by SEC head Gary Gensler, who branded cryptocurrency platforms a “Wild West” of fraud and investor risk in 2021.
