US SEC Wants To Close The Blockvest Case For Good

The US SEC wants to finally close the case of Blockvest and its founder Reginald Buddy Ringgold III after they filed a motion for sanctions as reported previously in the blockchain news.

The US SEC wants to crack down on other crypto scams that took place in the past few years and one of the most recent examples was the case against Blockvest and its founder. Back in January, the regulators filed a motion for sanctions against the platform and its founder and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission claimed that Ringgold used the company to defraud investors which could earn him a permanent injunction. The regulator wanted to impose civil penalties as well as disgorgement.

The regulator also produced evidence against the founder of Blockvest showing that he knew when the submitted false and forged declarations in order to make his defense tighter. The reports of the regulator show that Ringgold attempted to persuade two pre-ICO investors to submit the fake statements that regarded their expectations of receiving profits from the Blockvest tokens. The profit expectations are one of the Howey Test’s key criteria and are the SEC’s main benchmark for determining whether a token sale is unregistered security or it is not.

Ringgold also tried to convince another affiliate to lie to the regulators about a $147,000 payment which is supposedly dedicated to the company’s own development. The regulator stated that:

‘’Based on the evidence … there can be no genuine issue of material fact that defendants violated the federal securities laws through their fraudulent unregistered offer and sale of ‘BLV’ tokens.’’

The initial enforcement action from October 2018, showed that Blockvest had managed to raise up to $2.5 million in the pre-ICO sale and it was discovered that Blockvest had advertised the investors about the token sale being registered with the SEC which was of course, false. Not only did Blockvest did that but the founder also deceived the investors claiming that it was under the eyes of the US CFTC and NFA. The project also claimed that it was audited by Deloitte which also was not true.

The SEC claims that there was no company listed as a partner to Blockvest and after hearing the accusations, Ringgold admitted that his company made mistakes but he also claimed that none of the misrepresentations involved securities.