The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed charges against HyperFund, a cryptocurrency project, accusing it of defrauding investors of $1.7 billion.
According to the complaint, the company's founders, Xue Lee and Brenda "Bitcoin Beautee" Chunga, raised this sum of money from people around the world between 2020 and 2022.
The founders allegedly promoted HyperFund as an opportunity to invest in profitable crypto mining operations, but in reality, according to the SEC, it was a pyramid scheme with no legitimate sources of income.
This caused the project to collapse at the end of 2022 and investors lost their funds.
According to representatives of the regulator, Lee and Chunga were either aware that HyperFund was a Ponzi scheme, or recklessly disregarded this information.