- The founder of AriseCoin and AriseBank woke up in prison this morning at the start of a five-year sentence
- Jared Rice, Sr. pleaded guilty to swindling investors out of over $4 million through the scam
- AriseBank was marketed as the world’s “first decentralized banking platform” when in fact it was a vehicle for Rice to live the high life
The founder of the fraudulent cryptocurrency AriseCoin has been handed a five-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to swindling some investors out of over $4 million. Jared Rice, Sr. invented the cryptocurrency in 2018 at the height of the ICO boom, along with another project, AriseBank, taking $4.25 million from early investors and spending it on personal luxuries. Rice had claimed that AriseBank would be the first fully regulated decentralized bank, offering full banking facilities, when in fact it was nothing but a scam aimed at enriching himself.
AriseBank and AriseCoin Nothing But Scams
Rice launched AriseBank and AriseCoin in mid-2018, claiming that it would offer FDIC-insured bank accounts and Visa-backed debit and credit cards, in addition to crypto services based on the AriseCoin token. In truth however, AriseBank was not qualified to undertake any such activities, and never got any further than a whitepaper and a website.
Rice solicited funds from early investors, accepting bitcoin, ETH, LTC and fiat currency, which he spent not on licenses or developing the platform but instead on hotels, food, transportation, a family law attorney, and more.
Rice Will Spend Five Years in Prison
Rice was arrested in November 2018 and charged with three counts of securities fraud and three counts of wire fraud. He and COO Stanley Ford quickly settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission to the tune of $2.7 million before Rice pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud in March 2019.
More than two years later he has finally been sentenced, with acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Prerak Shah yesterday announcing that Rice had been handed a five year prison sentence and restitution amounting to $4,258,073.
The AriseCoin case is yet another example of how corrupt the ICO world became in 2017 and 2018, with more and more cases ending in court in the last two years.
