The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has demanded a jury trial for an individual in connection with his alleged involvement in a multimillion-dollar cryptocurrency scam. According to the complaint filed with the Eastern District Court in New York this week, the regulator said it was pursuing damages from Swedish national Roger Nils-Jonas Karlsson on behalf of “thousands of retail investors.” The regulator claims Karlsson “enticed and defrauded” victims to invest in his company Eastern Metal Securities, on the promise of huge returns on investment.
The company was not registered with the SEC.
Nither Karlsson nor the company were registered with the SEC and were not legitimately exempt from the requirement to register. He is also accused of creating and using several fake identities to defraud unsuspecting investors in his schemes, thought to have run to over $3.5 million in BTC, according to the U.S. SEC. Karlsson also owns $1.5 million of real estate in Thailand, which was bought from the alleged crypto scam’s proceeds. The US SEC has clamped down on many crypto scams in the recent past, including fake ICOs and Ponzi schemes.
The US SEC claims that the company defrauded 2,200 investors.
According to the complaint, the US SEC has the victim count at 2,200 investors across 49 U.S. states and 45 other countries worldwide, reflecting the sheer scale of the fraud allegedly perpetrated by Karlsson and his company. In its complaint, the SEC said that the authorities should now detain Karlsson and others involved in the fraud, pending a jury trial to hear the evidence. Further, the SEC urged the court to order the surrender of Karlsson’s “ill-gotten gains,” plus additional penalties and pre-judgment interest. The court will now consider the submission from the SEC ahead of further action.
