Operators of fraud ICO PlexCorps ordered to pay $7 million

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In yet another enforcement action by the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC), the proprietors of fraudulent crypto project PlexCorps have been ordered to pay $7 million. In a press release, the regulator revealed that one of the operators was also barred from serving as a director or an officer of a public traded company.

The SEC has cracked down on scam crypto projects, and its actions have been paying off in recent weeks. In the past week, the regulator has won cases against Longfin, a publicly traded company which it accused of using false SEC filings and Block.one, the company behind EOS.IO, the software that the EOS blockchain is built on. Block.one settled with the SEC and agreed to pay $24 million in fines.

And now, it’s PlexCorps that the SEC has won a case against. In a complaint lodged close to two years ago, the regulator accused the company and its proprietors, Dominic Lacroix and Sabrina Paradis-Royer of fraudulently raising millions of dollars in an unregistered sale of securities.

The SEC also accused the company of using misleading and false statements to investors which included “misrepresentations about the size and scale of PlexCorps’ operations, the use of funds raised in the PlexCoin ICO, and the amount of funds raised in the PlexCoin ICO.”

In a ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, PlexCorps and its two proprietors were ordered to disgorge $4,563,468 in gains made from the PlexCoin ICO. The defendants were also ordered to pay $348,145 in prejudgment interest, with Lacroix and Paradis-Royer being ordered to pay $1 million each in civil penalty. The ruling also barred Lacroix from serving a director or officer of a public traded entity.

The judgment also ordered the defendants to surrender the rights to the $4 million they raised from investors which has been seized by a receiver appointed by the Superior Court of Quebec. They will also have to surrender the rights to $800,000 in investor funds held by U.S. entities which were subject to an asset freeze issued by a New York judge in June last year.

The SEC has been settling lately with many of the companies it has been after in the past two years. In September, it settled with Jonathan Lucas, the man behind the Fantasy Market porn portal where users could stream live to sex shows and pay using FM tokens, a crypto native to the platform.