A businessman from Brooklyn, NY is facing up to five years behind bars for running two scam ICOs back in 2017. Maksim Zaslavskiy pled guilty to peddling two scam ICOs to investors, conning them out of thousands of dollars. His first scam ICO was called RECoin and was allegedly backed by real estate listings. In the second scam, Zaslavskiy sold special diamond tokens that were supposedly backed by real diamonds. However, both ICOs turned out to be complete scams and Zaslavskiy made a fool out of more than 1,000 investors.
ICO Scams Becoming Commonplace
During the ICO boom people were throwing their cryptos into ICOs left, right, and center, largely thanks to the prolonged bull market. However, a big percentage of 2017’s ICOs have turned out to be nothing more than scams.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has begun cracking down on these scams, recently reigning in AirToken and its founders for violating securities laws. Despite it slamming the ICO as fraudulent, AirToken’s price mooned for a brief period before crashing back down to earth.
Stamping out ICO Scams
Several jurisdictions have finally had enough of illicit ICOs and the bad reputation that they bring with them. The Bahamas is currently working on ICO regulations that will help sift out the scams from the genuine ICOs, all in a bid to clean up its appearance in the global crypto markets. France has also recently passed its own ICO regulations in a bid to create a UCITS like structure for ICOs, giving genuine projects a stamp of approval to operate in the country.
Polis Hunting for Scammers
Over in America, Jared Polis has begun hunting down crypto scammers – especially underhanded ICOs. After winning the race for the governor’s house in Colorado, Polis is working on cleaning up the crypto and blockchain scene before he puts his crypto and blockchain-friendly plans into action.
Last week, the Colorado Division of Securities issued cease and desist orders to four ICOs suspected of being scams – talk about hitting the ground running. Polis appears to be one of the few politicians that sticks to his word – so far at least.
Zaslavskiy is facing not only jail time, but also civil punishments from the SEC. He simply dressed up an age-old scam as a new digital currency in the hope of catching out unsuspecting investors. Sadly, Zaslavskiy appears to have pulled it off – but no crime goes unpunished. While Zaslavskiy might have got away with it for a few months, it was only a matter of time before regulators caught up with him.
