Topic: Gary Gensler's SEC sues Crypto Influncers and posts on his Twitter as propaganda - page 9. (Read 2912 times)

Nothing really, I was just pointing out this has happened many times before. From direct mail to radio to TV and now to the internet.
The medium has changed not the scam. Every time the medium changed the authorities started going after these people again until it slowed down. And then the next bunch starts with the next was go getting to people.

As the saying goes, you can't fix stupid. If you want to invest in something because somebody tells you to without doing ANY kind of research then you are going to get burned.
Part of the job of these government agencies is to act as your mom and stop you from doing soothing stupid. If they should or not have that as part of their job is a discussion for a different place.

-Dave

Yet people are puppets and pawns in the eyes of these influencers, so what more do you want to come out of this @DaveF ?

Meanwhile the SEC are looking to lobby all cryptocurrency as a security except for bitcoin.
https://news.bitcoin.com/ripple-lawyer-argues-sec-chair-gensler-has-prejudged-crypto-asset-cases

Nothing they haven't done before but this time it is post-FTX and the destruction they have caused littered with casualties in it's wake.

This is nothing new. Years ago there were celebrities promoting pump and dump stock scams who got slapped down bey the SEC hard. Then you have the people promoting gold & precious metals who got slapped down hard. The standards and laws and wording of what you have to tell people about in terms of risks and holdings have been settled law for decades. Just because it's new people with a new medium of communication about a new thing does not make it any different.

If you take advice from somebody who just posts videos on youtube or posts on other social media places you are an idiot.
If you are promoting these things without putting in a basic disclaimer about certain things you are an idiot.

-Dave

 

You mean what Khabib Nurmagomedov, a well known former fighter in the UFC, just did on his twitter promoting a cryptocurrency project?

"Do you want to enter a closed community and get the chance to meet with me? The new crypto product that I am creating in collaboration with the GMT project will be your pass. I'll tell you all the details soon"
https://twitter.com/TeamKhabib/status/1629067947376361472

Many are questioning if it was really him who put this tweet out or maybe his agent has control over what is published without his approval.
Who really knows with these celebrity types.

But from what I gathered by going to the site in question, here is what you see directly on the splash screen for their project. So you can decide if it sounds legitimate.
"Easy Way to Earn Bitcoin: Earn BTC via staking GMT Token, holding NFTs, and playing a game, all of which are backed by the real mining infrastructure of our data centers."

I would guess that the law is not there yet in time for him to get any punishments, he probably got a slap on the wrist type of thing, a stern warning of "never do it again if you do not want to pay millions in fine" and you are not going to see him do it ever again, not without disclosing at least.

I believe that sponsorship and business partnerships are different. How? Well let me put it this way, if you go on twitter and write "this new NFT is awesome!" that's basically getting paid to promote, but if Logan has a fight, and he gets a sponsorship for the fight, lets say on his trunks, and he tweets "thank you to X nft project for sponsoring me in this fight" that would be fine. He could try to do that.

Logan Paul has been caught to be prompting a definite scam of the failed Crypto Zoo project and those NFT eggs a little while ago.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64210289
But it never fell in any jurisdiction with the SEC for some reason.
Is it because it was too new for this law they have put in place trying to defend the public from being defrauded?
Or they didn't take enough money from their customers to make them take action? Only they would know.

I haven't been following any action taken by the SEC ever and I don't know whether they disclosed more cases than just the one about Kardashian because that puts them in a better light?

There are so many influencers or celebrities promoting scam tokens that the SEC could actually be posting several reports every day about that. I really think that this Kardashian thing was something they couldn't ignore because of the public awareness.

Yet everyday rappers or boxers or people like Logan Paul pull of their scams or promote scam stuff and we don't get to read anything about it. Any other cases where celebrities have been sued or got a penalty by the SEC?

Basically this is just regarding law and nothing more, that's what I have been trying to convey to everyone. There is a law that says a make up youtuber has to say that they got paid (not directly say it but say like "business partnership" in description of the video) when they promote a new brush, and this is just a brush, how expensive it could be? Whereas we are talking about people promoting investment and causing millions of dollars to change hands with their promotions if they are famous enough.

This is why I believe that it shouldn't really be an issue or be weird for SEC to go after these people, you have to say it was a business partnership in order to get away from jail.

And the clear evidence of this is on twitter, instagram and meta for the courts to show they did do the crime.
Which is why the SEC has avocation for going after them in the first place. Because they did not put a disclosure in those promotions nor their videos.
Even the youtube crypto influencers are starting to put those disclaimers on daily videos once they publicize them on their channels.
Solely because the SEC have enforced their mandate with actually prosecuting these celebrities promoting these crypto projects.

The amounts were the same for both these promoters of the Ethereum Max token project.
Which I don't know if it was just for the amount they were paid to promote them or some other things they found to put towards the fine by the SEC.

I would assume saying they are not allowed to promote anything to do with cryptocurrency projects for the next three years is good enough and not warrant any jail time tells you something.
Just asking for the amount of money back for what they were paid was kind of a just a slap on the wrist and ask them not to do it again anytime soon does not solve anything.

Correct, I was in charge of the SEC I would propose those influencers to pay up 200% of the alleged money they received to promote those shitty coins and tokens. It does not make sense to fine someone if in the end they still will have profits from the crime they are being indicted of.

This is not supposed to be a slap on the wrist, otherwise these promoted scams won't get controlled at all.

Glad there government is serious about sueing up those famous and rich people promoting scam since this could serve a warning to many influencers to not try to promote any crypto scams to their followers also with other celebrity to use their fame and take advantage just for their own personal gain.



The amount is not huge and those big celebrities can pay that so there should be more to make them accountable so that this could serve a good reminder not to go on illegal promotions.

I agree that this is a good thing to do. This isn't some "be aware" story or scary thing, this isn't some witch hunt, these people promoted some shit stuff for money, making others lose, just so they could profit, and that is illegal.

You can't do that with gold, you can't do that with stocks, so you shouldn't be able to do it because it would cause others to lose so much money and not only unethical but it is against the law at the same time. On the other hand, if you come out and say "this project paid me to promote it" and then do it, that's fine, just like having an "advertisement" logo somewhere or something, allows people to see you got paid for it, otherwise what's the point.

If a project, token or security is actively being promoted by someone famous on social media, then that should be considered to be a red flag. Period.

I believe the settlement is not big enough to deter other shady people on internet to continue pushing these scams to their naive followers, in my opinion, instead going against legit tokens and coins like Bitcoin and BUSD, the SEC should step up their efforts to get "influencers" accountable if they do this.

SEC sues another celebrity the exact same one that they did to Kardashian on the promotion of a cryptocurrency scam.

SEC fines former NBA star Paul Pierce $1.4M over Etheruem Max
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/02/17/sec-sues-former-nba-star-paul-pierce-over-ethereummax-promos
https://decrypt.co/121615/nba-star-paul-pierce-sec-fine-ethereum-max

Don't know why it took this long after fining her to go after this ex-NBA star for the exact same suit regarding promotion of a cryptocurrency.
But they only did just settle this late last week so they are really going with a fine tooth comb to squeeze even more out of this situation on the aftermath of the downfall of cryptocurrency exchange FTX months later.

Here is the answer to beating the SEC, and essentially all of government's regulations, at least in the US.

There are two categories of living in the USA: Public, Private. Government has authority over public living, but it has very little authority over private living. The short answer is, live your life in private rather than public.

What does that mean for crypto? Do your crypto exchanging in private, so nobody knows the details about why you are transacting. Make a public statement for anyone who asks that such transactions have been done privately.

The fact is that if you don't use any public exchanges, the details behind any crypto operation ARE extremely private already. It takes the CIA and the NSA a bit of work to find out who is even behind transactions, provided that you don't tell them, and provided that you use a VPN to mask your Internet IP address.

If you want to go the rest of the way in privatizing your crypto transactions, join a private crypto club (is there such a thing?), or make a simple private club between yourself and whoever you are transacting with. Have the club in writing, so that you can show that it is private if the SEC asks about it. Use Private Membership Association (PMA) transacting.

What I mean is this. If your buddy comes over to your house, and you trade a bunch of money in your living room, it's a private transaction. Same with crypto. But make a formal agreement (PMA) that this is between the two of you, so that if the SEC pokes their nose in, they don't have the authority. It was private.

There are two parts to PMA making and operating: the formal PMA membership, and what to do to handle things if the SEC won't back down when you show them the PMA paperwork. Both parts can be found at the ProAdvocate Group here https://www.proadvocate.org/. The basic guy behind this was Karl Dahlstrom (deceased) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13OHj_2TOOA. But a general search on PMAs will give you a lot of info about how they are in use all over the place right now - https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=private+membership+association&ia=web.

Two thoughts regarding crypto and the PMA:

1. PMAs have no limit to the number of them that can be made. The only thing is to show something in the particular PMA in question that it is different than any other PMA. The way to do this with your crypto PMA is to use the hash of the transaction as the identification number of your PMA. Make a new PMA every time you transact. Write the PMA membership details right in the client, and reference it all in the transaction memo.

2. If the SEC drags you into court, never use an attorney. Why not? Because doing so drags you into the public, the exact thing that you don't want. See https://www.youarelaw.org/Download/CorpusJurisSecundum-AttorneyClient.pdf. ProAdvocate Group explains about not using an attorney. Rather, use a paralegal that you have contracted with to be your co-counsel. Much of the time paralegals know more law than attorneys, because attorneys use them to do their case research legwork.

SEC is the root of all problems when it comes to anything crypto related as anyone can see what it had done to it:
For the first time in it's history there was a death cross on the weekly technical analyst of bitcoin yesterday.

Here is a rundown of what this governing arm has done in the past 6 months to have it come to this:

https://twitter.com/robustus/status/1623484121342173184

I don't understand why they need these influencers to promote crypto. I think there isn't any need to hire this paid influencer to encourage crypto.
Let it be reached organically by the people.

After Gemini with their lending program go defunct the SEC and Gary Gensler sues Genesis and owners the Winklevoss twins,
https://nypost.com/2023/01/13/sec-sues-winklevoss-twins-over-gemini-earn-program-that-sparked-900m-crisis

Because it only takes one miner to out do what Craig Wright has done and not an entire government funded section dedicated to just securities it seems.


https://protos.com/craig-wrights-bsv-chain-has-been-captured-by-a-single-miner/

Well then @dkbit98 you do not want to know about ripple and what the government has done with this case yet again involving their corrupt hand the SEC. They had people in government who have held assets while this trial was going on.
But back to the topic at hand.

This fine to Kasdashian was seen as a slap on the wrists because she was paid $250K to promote the project at the time. So really only had to make a settlement of $750K according to the quarterly.
The real punishment in this would be she can not pursue wanting to become a lawyer any longer because this is not allowed to have anything concerning the SEC filed against you and having not passed the bar exam.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/kim-kardashian-settles-with-sec-over-crypto-promotion/2022/10/03/8976daa8-4313-11ed-be17-89cbe6b8c0a5_story.html