Security News > 2023 > March > B-List celebs including Lindsay Lohan fined after crypto shill probe

According to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, entities controlled by Sun sold crypto asset securities called Tronix and BitTorrent - but were not registered to do so.

The SEC alleges it detected Sun "Fraudulently manipulating the secondary market for TRX through extensive wash trading, which involves the simultaneous or near-simultaneous purchase and sale of a security to make it appear actively traded without an actual change in beneficial ownership."

Lohan was billed as a partner of Sun's and told Forbes: "I quickly realized that my community could benefit from crypto and that I could inform a large segment of society that wasn't involved in the blockchain space and introduce them to it."

The SEC alleges he "Directed his employees to engage in more than 600,000 wash trades of TRX between two crypto asset trading platform accounts he controlled, with between 4.5 million and 7.4 million TRX wash traded daily."

"Gurbir S. Grewal, director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, stated that Sun used"an age-old playbook to mislead and harm investors by first offering securities without complying with registration and disclosure requirements and then manipulating the market for those very securities.

"At the same time, Sun paid celebrities with millions of social media followers to tout the unregistered offerings, while specifically directing that they not disclose their compensation. This is the very conduct that the federal securities laws were designed to protect against regardless of the labels Sun and others used."

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/03/23/lindsay_lohan_crypto/