SEC Charges Crypto Influencer for Promoting Unregistered ICO

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  • Influ­encer and cryp­to pro­mot­er Ian Bali­na lat­est to be tar­get­ed by the SEC
  • Accord­ing to the SEC, Bali­na agreed to invest around $5 mil­lion in the Spark­ster offer­ing and pro­mote the offered SPRK tokens on YouTube, Telegram and oth­er social media platforms

The US Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion has charged self-described cryp­to influ­encer Ian Bali­na for actions relat­ed to the offer­ing and pro­mo­tion of SPRK tokens, accord­ing to a court fil­ing released Monday. 

Bali­na, who pro­mot­ed SPRK tokens in 2018, failed to dis­close to investors that he was com­pen­sat­ed by the issuer, the SEC alleges in the suit. He also “failed to file a reg­is­tra­tion state­ment with the SEC for the tokens that he re-sold using an invest­ing pool that he orga­nized,” the fil­ing states. 

Spark­ster, a project that promised a “no-code” soft­ware cre­ation plat­form, raised over $30 mil­lion from its ini­tial coin offer­ing in July 2018. After rais­ing the funds, the project nev­er mate­ri­al­ized, as far as investors were con­cerned. In May 2022, Spark­ster appeared in head­lines again after the oth­er­wise dor­mant blockchain appeared to con­vert $22 mil­lion in ether into USDC. 

Accord­ing to the SEC, Bali­na agreed to invest around $5 mil­lion in the Spark­ster offer­ing and pro­mote the offered SPRK tokens on YouTube, Telegram and oth­er social media plat­forms. Balina’s agree­ment also came with a 30% bonus from Spark­ster on the tokens he pur­chased in the Spark­ster offer­ing, but Bali­na nev­er pub­licly dis­closed the com­mis­sion he received for his pro­mo­tion, the SEC alleges. 

The court fil­ing comes as fall­out from the pop­u­lar ICO days of 2018 con­tin­ues to per­sist in the cryp­to industry. 

The SEC sued set­tle­ment sys­tem Rip­ple and two exec­u­tives — founder Chris­t­ian Larsen and CEO Brad Gar­ling­house — about two years ago over alle­ga­tions that its XRP token was an unreg­is­tered secu­ri­ty offer­ing. Rip­ple dis­put­ed the alle­ga­tions and claimed XRP should be treat­ed as vir­tu­al cur­ren­cy, not a secu­ri­ty. If both par­ties get their way, the legal bat­tle will be deter­mined by a fed­er­al judge in a sum­ma­ry judgment.


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  • Casey Wag­n­er

    Block­works

    Senior Reporter

    Casey Wag­n­er is a New York-based busi­ness jour­nal­ist cov­er­ing reg­u­la­tion, leg­is­la­tion, dig­i­tal asset invest­ment firms, mar­ket struc­ture, cen­tral banks and gov­ern­ments, and CBD­Cs. Pri­or to join­ing Block­works, she report­ed on mar­kets at Bloomberg News. She grad­u­at­ed from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia with a degree in Media Studies.

    Con­tact Casey via email at [email pro­tect­ed]

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