The Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC ) has been busy dishing out enforcement actions over the past few weeks — and now it’s PlexCoin’s turn to feel the burn.
According to the SEC’s complaint , submitted on December 1, 2017, PlexCorps and its owners Dominic Lacroix and Sabrina Paradis-Royer fraudulently raised millions of dollars in virtual and fiat currency by selling unregistered securities through its PlexCoin initial coin offering (ICO).
The sale of such tokens , the SEC adds, was based on several false and misleading statements to potential and actual investors .
These included misrepresentations about the size and scale of the company’s operations, the amount of funds raised in the PlexCoin ICO, and what these were used for.
Several days later, on December 4, the SEC obtained an emergency asset freeze to cease on the “fast-moving” ICO , which raised up to $15 million from thousands of investors by promising a 13-fold profit in less than a month.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, the SEC states that defendants must pay $4,563,468, taken from the funds raised from its ICO, plus $348,145 in prejudgment interest.
Additionally, Lacroix and Paradis-Royer will each have to pay a $1,000,000 civil penalty.
Lacroix is also permanently banned from serving as an officer or director of a publicly traded company .
With the SEC ‘s fiscal year having ended on September 30 , it’s likely it’s rushing to get all the enforcement actions announced before the end of 2019. So, sit tight, we’ll probably be seeing more final judgements over the next few months.
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21.6% of Bitcoin hasn’t moved in five years — an all-time high
Bitcoin‘s recent sell-off, which pushed its price below $7,500 for the first time since May, wasn’t caused by capitulating long-term holders.
Instead, newbie Bitcoin investors (those that had held for between one and three months) initiated October’s steep price decline, reports boutique research firm Delphi Digital .
“In the days following the selloff, there was additional movement from slightly older holders in the 6-12 month range and 12-18 month range, with heightened exchange inflows to match,” said the firm.
Bitcoins with five-year UXTO ages reaches all-time high
Delphi Digital uses “ Unspent Transaction Output ” (UXTO) data to sort Bitcoins by the last time they were moved. The amount of time an amount of Bitcoin stays still is referred to as its “UXTO age.”
The graph below groups Bitcoins into colored bands: the green band represents those that haven’t moved for at least one year, for example. The black squiggly line indicates Bitcoin‘s price.
“There hasn’t been much movement from long-term holders this year despite the rollercoaster of price and sentiment,” said Delphi Digital. “The portion of supply that hasn’t moved in at least one year started the year at 55.6 percent, peaked at the end of April at 60.8 percent, and currently sits at 58.3 percent.”
As well, the amount of Bitcoins that haven’t moved for at least two years now represents 38.7 percent of the overall circulating supply, up from 34.6 percent at the start of the year.
Most notable however is that Delphi Digital’s data shows that 21.6 percent of available Bitcoin hasn’t moved for at least fi ve years — an all-time high, and a year-to-date increase of 1.1 percent.
“This is one of things that distinguishes this mini-cycle from true bull and bear cycles, you don’t have long term holders cashing out as prices really take off,” said Delphi Digital.
“Long-term holders will dictate cyclical tops and bottoms, but it’s the short-term traders that will have a larger impact on intra-cycle prices as they gauge, among other things, the flow of new money entering the space,” added the firm.
Twitter caught promoting bogus Elon Musk cryptocurrency scam
Those pesky Tesla-themed cryptocurrency scammers are back! Hackers have assumed the Twitterdentity of Elon Musk yet again , and are even paying Twitter to help swindle Bitcoin from unsuspecting users.
For roughly 24 hours, the scammers were using the (hopefully) compromised account of TV celebrity chef Tyler Florence to share malicious links to obviously fake Bitcoin giveaways. Florence’s account has almost 700,000 followers.
Note the little ‘Promoted’ watermark underneath the tweet, submitted to Hard Fork by an anonymous source.
It means hackers paid Twitter to share the cryptocurrency scams with as many users as possible – the audacity!
At first glance, Tyler Florence’s account is almost convincing as an Elon Musk doppelgänger, with cute ‘selfie’ and stolen ‘verified’ checkmark.
The scammers would have you believe “Elon Musk” would gift random strangers anywhere from one to 20 BTC ($6K – $120K) for every fraction of a Bitcoin sent, because hey, he’s just a nice fella.
It may appear obvious (to the keen-eyed Hard Fork reader) these giveaways are fake. Unfortunately, Hard Fork found the scammers might have already been successful.
Below are three recent deposits to the BTC wallet as shown in the image above. Note, the small fractions of BTC align with the instructions, and each of transactions occurred after hackers began tweeting from Florence’s account.
At the time of writing, it appears someone in Florence’s camp, or Twitter’s, has noticed, as the tweets are now being deleted.
Here is an archived version of the Twitter account in question.
The real Elon Musk is so fed up with the cryptocurrency scambots, he recently enlisted Jackson Palmer of Dogecoin infamy to help create an automated superweapon to rid Twitter of them once and for all.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey once reassured users they were working on a fix. Shortly after, Twitter declared checkmarks would be removed if display names were changed.
We can now confirm this to be completely ineffective.
Got anything else, Jack?
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