Modern Tech Company, a Ho Chi Minh City-registered startup with eight named shareholders, raised approximately VND 15 trillion — widely reported as $660 million — from an estimated 32,000 investors across Vietnam through two linked token sales, Pincoin and iFan, between late 2017 and early 2018. The scheme promised monthly returns of 40–48 percent on Pincoin investments, offered an 8 percent referral commission for recruiting new participants, and falsely represented both tokens as products of offshore entities based in Singapore and Dubai. In January 2018, the company stopped paying cash interest and began distributing iFan tokens in place of promised returns, valuing those tokens internally at $5 each against a real market price that had collapsed to approximately one cent. By early March 2018, Modern Tech’s operators had vacated their Ho Chi Minh City offices. On April 8, 2018, hundreds of investors gathered outside the now-empty premises; they found no staff, no assets, and no path to recovery.
The fraud combined two well-documented mechanisms: a classic multi-level marketing pyramid, in which earlier investors were paid using capital raised from later recruits, and an ICO exit, in which the token itself served as both the instrument of custody and the method of dilution. Investors did not hold assets in their own wallets during the fundraising phase; funds were remitted to Modern Tech and the company issued tokens whose value it controlled entirely. When it chose to exit, it did so by substituting a worthless second token for promised cash repayments, giving the scheme a few additional weeks of apparent operation before the principals disappeared.
Vietnamese authorities opened a criminal investigation in April 2018. Ho Chi Minh City police were formally tasked with the probe following a directive from Standing Vice Chairman Lê Thanh Liêm. The State Bank of Vietnam and the Prime Minister’s office both issued public statements, with Ho Chi Minh City’s police chief noting that all cryptocurrency transactions were at that time illegal under Vietnamese law. Prosecutorial proceedings followed, and Vietnamese court records — which are not systematically published in English — document the legal outcomes of the case against the identified principals.
The $660 million figure derives from investor-reported losses compiled by Vietnamese media and cited in Ho Chi Minh City government correspondence; it could not be independently verified through on-chain analysis at the time. Tech Wire Asia reported the figure as $658 million; CoinDesk noted it was unverified at publication. The investor count of 32,000 appears consistently across government communications and international press.
Dominic Lacroix, a Quebec-based serial securities offender, raised approximately $15 million USD from thousands of investors worldwide through the PlexCoin ICO between August and December 2017, promising a 1,354 percent return on investment within 29 days. The claim had no basis in any disclosed business model, revenue source, or asset. PlexCorps — Lacroix’s corporate vehicle — marketed the PLXC token through social media, a white paper, and a polished website, positioning the coin as a technological payment product while burying the actual pitch in its projected return figures.
On December 1, 2017, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed an emergency action in the Eastern District of New York, obtaining an immediate asset freeze and temporary restraining order against Lacroix, his partner Sabrina Paradis-Royer, and PlexCorps. It was the SEC’s first emergency halt of an ICO — a marker that placed PlexCoin at the center of what would become a broader regulatory reckoning with the 2017 token-sale boom. The SEC’s Division of Enforcement created a dedicated Cyber Unit partly in response to the ICO wave; PlexCoin was its inaugural enforcement target.
Lacroix did not comply. Within weeks of the federal injunction, he violated its terms, and in December 2017 a Quebec court jailed him for 60 days and fined him CAD $10,000 for contempt. The SEC civil proceedings were eventually settled in 2019 without admission of guilt. Canadian securities regulators, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), pursued parallel penal proceedings under Quebec’s Securities Act. On December 11, 2023, Quebec Court Judge Steve Magnan convicted Lacroix and his IT director Yan Ouellet on all counts; Paradis-Royer was acquitted. On November 14, 2024, Judge Magnan sentenced Lacroix to 42 months in prison and a CAD $150,000 fine. Ouellet received a lesser sentence. No investor restitution fund has been established.
The PlexCoin case is historically significant at a dollar value far below many contemporaneous frauds. Its importance lies in timing and precedent: it forced regulators on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border to confront ICOs as securities offerings, demonstrated that emergency injunctive powers could reach token sales, and established that a Canadian operator marketing to a global audience via the internet was within U.S. jurisdictional reach.
Centra Tech, Inc. raised approximately $25 million from investors between July and October 2017 through the sale of “CTR tokens” in an ICO that was built on a foundation of fabricated claims. The company’s three co-founders — Sohrab “Sam” Sharma, Robert Farkas, and Raymond Trapani — marketed a product they called the Centra Card: a cryptocurrency-linked Visa and Mastercard debit card that would allow holders to spend digital assets anywhere those networks were accepted. Neither Visa nor Mastercard had any partnership, agreement, or relationship with Centra Tech. The executives Centra named as its CEO and chief operating officer in promotional materials did not exist. When investors purchased CTR tokens, they were buying into a company whose core product claim was a complete fabrication.
To lend the ICO credibility and reach a large retail audience, Sharma and Farkas paid celebrity promoters. Floyd Mayweather Jr. received $100,000 to promote Centra Tech on social media; DJ Khaled received $50,000. Neither disclosed that their posts were paid advertisements, which violated securities laws governing the promotion of securities offerings. Both settled with the SEC in November 2018, paying a combined $767,500 in disgorgement, penalties, and interest. The celebrities were not charged criminally.
All three founders were arrested in April 2018. Farkas was arrested at Miami International Airport as he attempted to board a flight. Sharma and Trapani were subsequently apprehended. All three pleaded guilty. Sharma — the scheme’s acknowledged leader — was sentenced by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to eight years in federal prison. Farkas was sentenced to one year and one day. Trapani, who provided substantial cooperation with prosecutors, received a sentence of time served with no additional prison term. The case stands as one of the most thoroughly documented celebrity-adjacent ICO fraud prosecutions in the history of U.S. securities enforcement.
The 25,000 or more investors who purchased CTR tokens during the ICO received nothing of value. The tokens held no interest in any operational product, no backing from any institutional payment network, and no path to the returns implied by a functioning debit card platform. The total raised exceeded $25 million by some accounts; the SEC’s charging documents cite the figure as “over $25 million,” while later proceedings referenced figures closer to $32 million as the full amount raised across all instruments.
Michael Alan Stollery, founder and CEO of Titanium Blockchain Infrastructure Services, Inc. (TBIS), raised approximately $21 million from investors in the United States and internationally through the sale of BAR tokens in an ICO conducted between November 2017 and May 2018. The offering was premised on a catalogue of fabricated relationships: Stollery claimed that TBIS had active business relationships with the Federal Reserve, PayPal, Boeing, Apple, General Electric, eBay, Microsoft, Pfizer, Verizon, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Walt Disney, Universal Studios, and dozens of other prominent institutions. None of these relationships existed. The testimonials from these organizations published on the TBIS website were invented. The white paper’s partnership claims were false.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed an emergency action in May 2018, obtaining a court order halting the ICO and freezing Stollery’s and TBIS’s assets. A receivership was established to manage TBIS’s estate. In July 2022, Stollery pleaded guilty in the Central District of California to one count of securities fraud, admitting that he had falsified aspects of the TBIS white papers, planted fake client testimonials, and commingled ICO investor funds with his personal accounts. In December 2022, he was sentenced to four years and three months in federal prison — one of the most substantial custodial sentences imposed on a solo ICO fraud operator under securities law.
The investors who purchased BAR tokens did not receive any product, service, or return. TBIS had no operational blockchain infrastructure business at the scale or with the clients it claimed. The receivership proceedings established to manage the estate’s assets attempted to identify and preserve funds for the investor class, but the commingling of investor money with Stollery’s personal finances had rendered accurate accounting difficult by the time enforcement action was taken.
LoopX, a cryptocurrency startup that claimed to be developing an artificial-intelligence-powered trading platform, raised approximately $4.5 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum from investors across five consecutive token sale rounds in January and early February 2018. The company’s website, YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Telegram community were deleted without warning around February 8, 2018 — approximately one week before the platform’s scheduled public launch. No product was ever delivered. No member of the LoopX team has ever been publicly identified by name. No criminal charges have been filed against any individual. As of 2026, the LoopX exit scam remains a fully unresolved case in which the operators are at large, their identities unknown, and their location undetermined.
The $4.5 million raised consisted of 276 Bitcoin and approximately 2,446 Ether contributed across the five presale rounds. Investors tracking the funds on BitcoinTalk attempted to follow the on-chain transfers before the trail fragmented. The movement of funds from collection wallets was organized and coordinated — consistent with a pre-planned withdrawal, not the chaotic activity that follows a genuine security breach.
LoopX occupied a specific archetype in ICO-era fraud: the anonymous-team exit scam. Unlike PlexCoin (PA-002), Centra Tech (PA-003), or Titanium Blockchain (PA-004), LoopX had no named founders, no identified executives, no corporate registration that law enforcement could trace, and no disclosed jurisdiction of operation. The whitepaper named no individuals. The promotional videos featured animated graphics rather than on-camera presenters. Every element of the project’s public-facing identity was designed to be disposable — and on February 8, 2018, it was disposed of.
The LoopX exit was the fifth documented ICO exit scam in the first two months of 2018 alone, occurring in a concentrated period when anonymous-team ICOs were proliferating faster than any regulatory or platform framework could screen them. It has become a reference case in security research and investor-education literature as the cleanest example of the anonymous-team archetype: sufficient technical production value to attract real investment, no accountability infrastructure of any kind, and a vanishing that took less than a day to execute.
AriseBank, a Dallas-based venture co-founded by Jared Rice Sr. and Stanley Ford, raised approximately $4.25 million from investors during a token presale that ran from late 2017 into January 2018. The company claimed to be the world’s first decentralized bank, asserting that it had acquired a 100-year-old federally chartered commercial bank whose depositors would enjoy FDIC insurance — a false claim the FDIC confirmed it had no record of. AriseBank further represented that customers could access more than 700 cryptocurrencies via an AriseBank-branded Visa card, a claim for which no Visa partnership existed. Celebrity boxer Evander Holyfield was enlisted as a promotional figure.
On January 25, 2018, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission obtained an emergency temporary restraining order and asset freeze against AriseBank, Rice, and Ford in federal court in Dallas, halting the ICO before it reached its stated $1 billion target. Rice was arrested in Texas in 2018. He pleaded guilty in 2019 to one count of securities fraud. On August 25, 2021, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Texas sentenced Rice to five years in federal prison and ordered him to pay $4.25 million in restitution to investors. Stanley Ford, the co-founder and COO, settled the SEC’s civil charges, with the court ordering him and Rice together to pay approximately $2.7 million in civil disgorgement and penalties.
The AriseBank case is notable for three compounding frauds: the fabricated institutional claims (FDIC insurance, Visa partnership, bank acquisition), the concealed criminal background of Rice — who was on probation from a 2015 Texas felony conviction for theft and tampering with government records at the time he solicited investors — and the use of a celebrity sports figure to project legitimacy to an audience that had no reason to doubt the endorsement was independent.
Maksim Zaslavskiy, a Brooklyn-based businessman, operated two sequential fraudulent token offerings between mid-2017 and late 2017: REcoin Group Foundation, LLC, marketed as “The First Ever Cryptocurrency Backed by Real Estate,” and DRC World, Inc., also known as Diamond Reserve Club, marketed as an exclusive tokenized membership pool backed by physical diamond investments. Neither scheme had purchased any real estate. Neither had acquired any diamonds. The certificates Zaslavskiy distributed to investors to represent ownership were worthless instruments backed by nothing. Combined losses were approximately $300,000 based on verified investor funds; some reporting estimated total solicitations at up to $2 million.
The SEC filed a civil complaint against Zaslavskiy in September 2017, halting both offerings. Federal criminal charges followed. On November 15, 2018, Zaslavskiy pleaded guilty in federal court in Brooklyn to conspiracy to commit securities fraud — making him the first person in the United States to plead guilty to criminal charges arising from an ICO fraud. On November 18, 2019, U.S. District Judge Raymond J. Dearie sentenced Zaslavskiy to 18 months in federal prison. Zaslavskiy had argued throughout the proceedings that his tokens were currencies, not securities, and therefore not subject to federal securities law — a defense Judge Dearie rejected, establishing in the process a foundational precedent that tokens offered in ICOs can constitute securities regardless of how their issuers label them.
The case’s legal significance extends well beyond its relatively modest dollar figures. It marked the first time the U.S. Department of Justice brought and resolved criminal charges arising from an ICO, establishing that the securities fraud statute applied to token offerings and that operators who lied about the backing of their tokens could face prison — not merely civil penalties.
ICOBox was a platform launched in 2017 by Nikolay Evdokimov that purported to offer end-to-end services for companies conducting initial coin offerings — legal structuring, marketing, white-label technology, and investor outreach. In September 2017, before offering those services at scale, ICOBox raised approximately $14.6 million by selling its own ICOS token to more than 2,000 investors in an offering it did not register with the SEC. The token was sold on the promise it would function as the platform’s primary access credential and appreciate as the client roster grew.
The SEC filed a civil complaint against ICOBox and Evdokimov in September 2019, charging both with conducting an unregistered securities offering and with acting as unregistered brokers in connection with at least 30 other ICOs. After being served, Evdokimov went silent, vacated his last known residence in the middle of the night with two months’ rent unpaid, and did not appear in the litigation. On March 5, 2020, U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer of the Central District of California entered a default judgment: $16 million against ICOBox and a personal civil penalty of more than $192,000 against Evdokimov. His whereabouts remained unconfirmed.
The case carries a structural irony that regulators noted explicitly: a company that existed to facilitate other companies’ token sales conducted its own token sale in violation of the securities laws it was nominally advising clients to navigate. The platform for ICOs was itself an illegal ICO.
GPay Network, a Swiss-registered ICO project that also operated under the brand name “Kali-X,” raised more than $33 million across multiple jurisdictions between 2018 and 2019 through a series of token sales marketed to investors in Europe, Asia, and North America. The project presented itself as a global payment infrastructure platform with its own token, promising to deliver a fast, low-cost payment network powered by blockchain technology. Its operators communicated through pseudonyms throughout the project’s lifespan; no verified natural persons behind the founding team have been publicly identified in law enforcement records. GPay Network rebranded at least once — emerging as “Kali-X” under fresh marketing materials and updated whitepapers — before both the GPay and Kali-X web presences went offline without warning. No proceeds were returned to investors. No public arrest or criminal charge linked to the scheme’s operators has been documented as of this writing.
The GPay Network case illustrates a pattern common to a distinct subset of 2018–2019 ICO frauds: schemes structured not with a single exit event but with rolling rebrands that extended the fundraising period, rotated the narrative, and diluted investor organizing capacity. By the time the Kali-X brand had itself collapsed, investors who had participated in the original GPay raise were already fractured across different communication channels, legal jurisdictions, and stages of financial loss. The rebrand served simultaneously as a fundraising refresh and as a clock-reset that complicated victim coordination and regulatory attribution.
Swiss financial regulators at FINMA documented a significant increase in fraudulent ICO activity during this period, placing multiple projects on its public warning list and pursuing enforcement actions against unauthorized token issuers. In 2019, FINMA reported having investigated sixty ICO-related inquiries and taken formal action against multiple unauthorized schemes. GPay Network’s Swiss registration — a common choice for ICO operators in this era due to Switzerland’s regulatory reputation and relative openness to blockchain projects — did not subject the project to effective oversight before its collapse. The operators remain unidentified and at large.
Paragon Coin Inc. raised approximately $12 million from investors between August and October 2017 through an unregistered token sale, marketing its PRG token as the currency of a blockchain infrastructure platform built specifically for the cannabis industry. The project was co-founded by Jessica VerSteeg — former Miss Iowa, model, and social media personality — and her husband Egor Lavrov. Paragon’s promotional campaign featured endorsements from prominent figures including rapper The Game (Jayceon Taylor), who publicly declared on social media that Paragon was “preparing to revolutionize cannabis and the world.” In November 2018, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission settled administrative cease-and-desist proceedings against Paragon Coin Inc., requiring the company to pay a $250,000 civil monetary penalty, register its PRG tokens as securities, and offer to refund investors. No fraud charges were filed; the SEC charged only that Paragon had sold unregistered securities in violation of Sections 5(a) and 5(c) of the Securities Act of 1933. Paragon filed for bankruptcy in April 2020. The SEC ultimately distributed approximately $175,000 from a Fair Fund to affected investors — a fraction of the $12 million raised.
The ROSTER entry for this file lists the status as “Convicted.” This requires clarification. The SEC action against Paragon Coin was a civil administrative settlement, not a criminal conviction. Paragon Coin Inc. consented to the cease-and-desist order without admitting or denying the SEC’s findings. No individual associated with Paragon — including VerSteeg or Lavrov — was criminally indicted or convicted in the criminal sense in connection with the ICO itself. The civil settlement, while legally significant as one of the first SEC enforcement actions imposing penalties solely for an unregistered ICO, did not result in prison sentences, criminal records, or findings of fraud against any individual. The “Convicted” designation in the ROSTER reflects the civil resolution and the court-ordered liability entered against The Game in a subsequent class action, discussed below. Readers should understand that this is a civil resolution, not a criminal one.
WCX Exchange, a cryptocurrency trading platform project that marketed itself as a “low-fee digital currency exchange built by ex-Apple engineers,” raised approximately $12.5 million from investors through a token sale that ran from late 2017 into 2018. The project promoted its WCXT token — priced at ten tokens per US dollar during the ICO — as a profit-sharing instrument that would pay holders a percentage of the exchange’s future trading revenues. The exchange was never launched in functional form. By mid-2019, the WCX website and all associated social media channels had gone dark without any communication to token holders. No returns were distributed. The team operated under pseudonyms throughout; the claimed identities of the two publicly named team members were found to be fabricated before the ICO had closed. No public arrest or enforcement action against any individual connected to WCX has been documented.
WCX arrived on BitcoinTalk in July 2017 — the primary forum through which ICO projects recruited early investor communities at the height of the token sale boom — and rapidly accumulated followers through a referral and bounty campaign that rewarded users for sharing the project with new contacts. Its marketing narrative combined two claims with strong appeal in the 2017 crypto market: technical credibility, through the Apple engineer backstory, and financial return, through the profit-sharing model that promised passive income to token holders from an exchange that would undercut competitors on fees. Neither claim survived scrutiny. The Apple connection was fabricated. The exchange never generated fees to distribute.
The WCXT token, which traded on secondary markets after the ICO closed, lost more than 90 percent of its ICO-price value within months of the sale’s conclusion. The discrepancy between the token’s market performance and the project’s promotional claims attracted escalating skepticism in the crypto community from late 2017 onward, but WCX continued to raise funds by extending and relaunching its ICO over successive rounds. The final disappearance of the website and social media in 2019 came after a period of progressively reduced communication that itself followed a pattern of unfulfilled launch promises. The identities of the natural persons who designed, operated, and benefited from the scheme remain unconfirmed.
DavorCoin was a Croatian-linked cryptocurrency lending platform that launched in December 2017 and raised more than $10 million from investors before its website went offline in March 2018 — fewer than four months after it opened. The platform promised monthly returns of up to 38 percent through a “lending program” whose mechanics were functionally identical to those of BitConnect, the most prominent crypto Ponzi scheme of the era. Investors deposited DAV tokens into the lending program, which purportedly deployed them through an automated trading system to generate the promised returns. No such trading system existed in any verifiable form. When the platform closed, investors lost access to their deposited tokens and their promised earnings. The operator or operators using the name “Davor” were never publicly identified; no individual has been arrested or charged in connection with the scheme as of the research date.
DavorCoin’s rise and collapse occurred within a compressed window framed by BitConnect’s own trajectory. BitConnect, the lending platform that DavorCoin most directly replicated, had been operating since mid-2016 and began receiving cease-and-desist letters from US state securities regulators in January 2018. BitConnect shut down its lending and exchange operations on January 16, 2018, less than six weeks after DavorCoin launched. DavorCoin continued operating through February 2018 despite the obvious structural parallel — some investors explicitly migrated funds from the closed BitConnect into DavorCoin during this window — before its own closure in March. The overlap between BitConnect’s collapse and DavorCoin’s continued operation, followed immediately by DavorCoin’s exit, is one of the more clearly documented examples of how the collapse of one Ponzi can briefly accelerate the growth of its imitators before the same structural failure overtakes them.
The funds raised by DavorCoin — documented by on-chain analysis of the DAV token contract and investor reports — are estimated at more than $10 million, though precise figures are difficult to establish because the platform’s records were not made available for any regulatory proceeding. No charges have been filed in any jurisdiction. The identities of the individuals behind the platform remain unknown.
Prodeum was a Lithuanian blockchain project that raised $11 from investors in January 2018 before its operators deleted the project website and replaced it with a single obscene word. The project had claimed to build a blockchain-based tracking system for fruit and vegetable supply chains, using ERC-20 tokens to record the provenance, transport, and sale of agricultural produce on the Ethereum network. Its whitepaper described a functional product roadmap, a named team of advisors, and a token economy designed to incentivize supply-chain participants. None of the team members could be verified as real people. The project’s social media presence and website disappeared within days of the ICO’s soft-cap period closing. The homepage replacement with an obscene word was the operators’ only public communication after the exit.
The $11 raised — verified through on-chain analysis of the PRE token’s contribution address — is not a typographical error or a rounding artifact. It is the confirmed total of investor funds received. At face value, this makes Prodeum an insignificant financial event: eleven dollars is less than the price of a cup of coffee at a specialty cafe in Vilnius. But the case’s significance has never rested on its financial scale. Prodeum became one of the most extensively documented exit scams of the ICO era because it illustrated, with unusual clarity and almost no noise from financial complexity, the complete anatomy of a token-sale fraud: the whitepaper fabrication, the false team construction, the ICO mechanics, the social media presence, the trust-building period, and the exit. Every element of the fraud was present. The only anomaly was the amount raised.
Prodeum’s documentation in the cryptocurrency press, in academic and regulatory analyses of ICO fraud, and in investor education materials has been disproportionate to its financial harm because it serves as a clean teaching case. The identities of its operators have never been confirmed. No charges have been filed in any jurisdiction. The obscene-word homepage is preserved in web archive records.