Regulators in Canada and in the U.S. have disclosed that they will soon launch an expansive crackdown on a number of the cryptocurrency investment schemes. The same message was also echoed on Monday by the North American Securities Administrators Association.
SEE: China’s IFCERT Tracks Down 421 Fake Cryptocurrencies; 60% Run By Overseas Servers
The launch of investigations
Recent reports indicate about 40 state and provincial watchdogs are participating in the “Operation Crypto-Sweep,” which has so far managed to trigger about 70 investigations. The coordinated effort focuses on the initial coin offerings which happens to be a cryptocurrency fundraising process as well as on a wide range of other “investment schemes.”
The director of enforcement at the Texas State Securities Board, Joseph Rotunda, outlined that the market for cryptocurrency investments despite many efforts remained saturated with fraud.The international task force is still far from accomplishing its work. According to Rotunda, “Promoters also know that anyone can be anyone and say anything about anything on the internet. Not surprisingly, they are also manipulating photographs, media, testimonials and other online information to deceive the public into believing their claims.”
Ways companies deviate and the warning sent out
Texas regulators in May sent out a warning letter to BTCrush, which is based in the U.K. According to them, it was a total violation of the securities laws and had also misled quite a significant number of investors through its marketing. The crackdown will also involve participation from the Massachusetts regulators. According to the state’s secretary of the commonwealth, William Francis Galvin around 30,000 crypto-related domain name registrations were tracked down by the task force of NASAA and most of them were created sometime in late 2017 at the time the Bitcoin (BTC) prices escalated to around $20,000.
Time and again the business guru has published videos, which show the interior and workings of what was believed to be the three fully operating mining farms. It was in a report unveiled by the regulators that it was disclosed that most of these videos had been sourced from publicly available stock footage.
The Texas regulator is also up against Wind Wide Coin, which is said to have used pictures of celebrities including Prince Charles and Jennifer Aniston in the advertisement of its cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin (BTC-USD) is trading at $8330.28 down $89.37 (1.0614%) with about $471MM trading hands in the last 24 hours. Bitcoins current market cap is about $142 Billion USD.
Ethereum (ETH-USD) is trading at $687.39 down $9.34 or 1.3% and Ripple (XRP-USD) is trading at $.66 down almost 1%.
