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.
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.
Neil Suresh Chandran, the operator of a cluster of technology companies incorporated under the “ViRSE” banner in the United States, raised more than $45 million from over 10,000 investors between at least January 2019 and 2022 by promising them a share of proceeds from the imminent sale of a blockchain technology called CoinDeal to a group of unnamed, wealthy, and prominent buyers. No such sale ever occurred. No such buyers existed. The token itself had no working blockchain, no product, and no value beyond the representations Chandran and his co-promoters communicated through emails, conference calls, and referral networks. The funds were transferred to Chandran’s controlled accounts and spent on personal luxury, including real estate, vehicles, and a boat.
The CoinDeal scheme operated not through a public token listing or decentralized sale, but through a private referral and email marketing network in which intermediary promoters — including Michael Glaspie, who operated under the alias “Mike G” — disseminated Chandran’s false updates to investor communities already conditioned to expect crypto windfalls. Chandran framed each delay in the promised payout as temporary, sustaining investor belief through fabricated progress reports about negotiations with the fictitious acquirers. By the time investors recognized the scheme had produced nothing, the money had been spent.
The United States Department of Justice indicted Chandran in the District of Nebraska. A parallel Securities and Exchange Commission civil complaint, filed in the Northern District of Illinois in January 2023, named eight defendants: Chandran, Garry Davidson, Michael Glaspie, Linda Knott, Amy Mossel, and corporate entities AEO Publishing Inc., Banner Co-Op Inc., and BannersGo LLC. Glaspie pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in February 2023 and was sentenced to 72 months of imprisonment in October 2023. Chandran and Bryan Lee — charged separately in Nebraska — both entered guilty pleas on April 16, 2026. Chandran’s sentencing before Judge Susan M. Bazis is scheduled for July 9, 2026 and had not yet occurred as of the date of this dossier.
Garry Davidson, who served as an intermediary communicating on Chandran’s behalf, had previously been a victim in one of Chandran’s earlier schemes before being recruited as a participant. In June 2024, a federal court in the Eastern District of Michigan entered a final civil judgment against Davidson requiring disgorgement of $3,911,302 plus prejudgment interest and a matching civil penalty.
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.
Robert Dunlap and Nicole Bowdler raised more than $4 million from United States investors between 2018 and 2020 through the sale of META1 tokens, falsely claiming each coin was backed by $1 billion in gold assets and priced at $44,000 per token. The scheme combined fabricated asset backing, extravagant return promises, and a distinctive legal claim that the United States Securities and Exchange Commission had no authority over their offering — a position rooted in sovereign-citizen ideology. The SEC obtained an emergency asset freeze and halt of the offering in March 2020. Dunlap and Bowdler were subsequently indicted, tried, and convicted. Dunlap was sentenced to five years in federal prison in 2023; Bowdler received a sentence of three years probation after pleading guilty and cooperating with prosecutors.
META1 was marketed as a “humanitarian” project offering financial liberation to ordinary Americans, particularly those the promoters described as underserved by the traditional banking system. The whitepaper and promotional materials claimed that the token’s value was guaranteed by gold reserves held in trust, that the coin could never lose value, and that profits of 224,923 percent were achievable. No gold reserves existed. No trust structure held any assets. The $44,000 per-token price was invented. Investors who wired funds or sent cryptocurrency to the offering received tokens that were, by any honest accounting, worthless instruments backed by nothing other than the promoters’ assertions.
The SEC’s emergency action in March 2020 froze approximately $9 million in assets associated with the scheme and appointed a receiver. Civil and criminal proceedings ran in parallel. The criminal case proceeded in the Western District of Texas, where both defendants were ultimately convicted. The Meta 1 Coin case is notable both for the scale of the fabrications involved — a per-token price of $44,000 and a claimed $1 billion gold reserve are among the more extreme false valuations documented in SEC enforcement records — and for the explicit invocation of sovereign-citizen legal theory as a purported shield against federal oversight.