Last week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
announced charges against four individuals for their roles in Trade
Coin Club (TCC), which the SEC describes as “a fraudulent
crypto Ponzi scheme that raised more than 82,000 bitcoin, valued at
$295 million at the time, from more than 100,000 investors
worldwide.” According to the complaint, TCC was a multilevel
marketing program that operated from 2016 through 2018 and promised
profits from the trading activities of a purported crypto asset
trading bot. Defendants told investors the bot made “millions
of microtransactions” every second and that investors would
receive a minimum return of 0.35 percent daily. However, according
to the SEC, instead of investors' funds being deployed for
the purported bot, they went into the pockets of defendants and
other TCC promoters.
