The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged eleven individuals with creating and promoting the cryptocurrency pyramid Forsage, which raised more than $300 million from investors around the world.
The defendants reportedly include four Forsage founders who lived in Russia, Georgia and Indonesia, as well as several US residents who promoted the fraudulent scheme.
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According to the regulator's documents, in January 2020, Vladimir Okhotnikov, Mikhail Sergeev, Sergey Maslakov and Jane Doe launched the Forsage.io website.
With its help, millions of retail investors were supposedly able to transact through smart contracts running on the Ethereum, Tron and Binance blockchains.
However, according to the SEC, Forsage was in fact a financial pyramid, whose participants made profits by attracting new investors.
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In 2020, the Philippine SEC announced that Forsage had signs of a financial pyramid, whereas in March last year, Montana regulators also declared the project to be a fraudulent scheme.