SEC fines $4M on Coinme over unregistered UpToken ICO
The United States Securities regulatory body settled charges against Coinme and grabbed $4 million as a fine from CoinMe & its subsidiary.
Coinme is a digital assets exchange headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It offers technology for Bitcoin ATMs and kiosks, to allow crypto to fiat conversion easily. It was only Coinme which launched the first 100% regulated Bitcoin ATM in America.
Recently the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that Coinme, its subsidiary Up Global SEZC, and the CEO of both firms, Neil Bergquist, admitted all the charges, which were raised by the SEC body over the company’s Initial Coin Offering (ICO) of UP in 2017.
According to the SEC Agency, Coinme’s ICO was an unregistered securities offering, and also the company passed many misleading statements regarding its token. Against all these charges, Coinme paid a $3.52 million penalty.
Coinme and Bergquist agreed to pay a fine of $250,000 & $150,000 respectively in separate penalties.
This news failed to impact the trade price of the Up token, as we can see in the price graph.
SEC vs Crypto
Over the last couple of years, the US SEC initiated many enforcement actions against crypto companies. Before Q1 2022, the SEC body targeted mainly suspicious model-based crypto companies but this year the SEC agency initiated many enforcement actions against top regulated crypto companies but failed to provide clarity over the actions.
The majority of the crypto proponents believe that the SEC is taking action against crypto companies with this rude behavior because of the crypto hate stance of SEC Chairman Gary Gensler.
Since Dec 2020, the US SEC & Ripple (XRP) has been in a big legal fight over the nature of the XRP token but still court hearings are taking place & court judge failing to give judgment in favor of any of these two entities.
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