Former boxing welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather and celebrity music producer DJ Khaled have become involved in a possible multi-million dollar crypto-scam in the form of a fake ICO called Centra Tech.
By agreeing to officially endorse Centra Tech, the two alleged co-conspirators have violated SEC regulations by promoting fraudulent (not to mention unregulated) trading instruments; in this case its an unregulated initial coin offering. The two of the founders of Centra Tech – Sam Sharma and Robert Farkas – were arrested by local law enforcement officials over charges related to securities fraud and wire fraud and a class action lawsuit was filed against them.
According to the ICO white paper, Centra Tech had partnered with Visa and Mastercard in order to issue a debit card for cryptocurrencies – this claim was officially denied by Visa as well as Mastercard.
A civil suit filed by the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), the official financial regulator in the USA, stated that the ICO was endorsed by the dup by “touting nonexistent relationships between Centra and well-known financial institutions,” hence deliberately misleading potential investors.
In an interview on the Neocash Radio podcast during August 2017, Sharma said that: “Internationally we currently have our license with Mastercard to service international clients, domestically we have a Visa partnership, so we’re able to issue Visa cards domestically.” Again, this claim was categorically denied by Visa at a later stage.
Fake ICOs are just one example of crypto scams which have been flooding the internet. Get-rich-quick scams such as Bitcoin Trader and Bitcoin Aussie System have also been exposed by industry-leading websites.
