The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed charges against the cryptocurrency company Unicoin and its management. Relevant information published on the official website of the SEC.
The company itself and three of its executives — CEO Oleksandr Konanikhin, former president Silvina Moscini, and former investment director Alex Dominguez — were indicted. They are accused of fraud when attracting investments.
Konanikhin is a former Russian businessman living in the United States. At the start of the full-scale war, he promised $1 million for the capture of Vladimir Putin. According to the investigation, the Unicoin platform misled more than 5,000 investors and collected more than $100 million from them. The company is said to have falsified data about its financial stability – telling investors about decades of solid performance, when in fact the financial reserve was only a few months or less than a year.
“We allege that Unicoin and its executives exploited thousands of investors by making bogus promises that their tokens would be backed by real assets, including an international portfolio of valuable real estate. But we allege that the real estate assets were worth only a fraction of what the company claimed and most of the sales of rights certificates were illusory. Unicoin’s top management allegedly rooted the fraud, and today’s lawsuit seeks to impeach them to responsibility for their behavior”. – howled Mark Cave, deputy director of the SEC’s enforcement division.
The lawsuit was filed in the District Court for the Southern District of New York. The SEC is seeking an injunction, restitution of the ill-gotten gains with interest, and civil penalties against all defendants. The company’s legal counsel, Richard Devlin, agreed to pay a $37,500 fine without admitting or denying the charges.
