Image via REUTERS/Ahmed Yosri
According to a press statement from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Lindsay Lohan, Soulja Boy, Lil Yachty, Jake Paul, and four other celebrities are accused of promoting cryptocurrencies without disclosing to their audiences that they were being paid to do so.
Akon, Ne-Yo, Austin Mahone, and Kendra Lust complete the roster.
They have a specific mandate to promote TRX and BTT. Owner of both cryptocurrency businesses is Justin Sun, who is also facing fraud charges. For the unregistered offer and sale of crypto asset securities Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent, his firms Rainberry Inc. (formerly BitTorrent), BitTorrent Foundation Ltd., and Tron Foundation Limited are named (BTT).
The claim against Sun and his businesses is that they offered and sold TRX and BTT as investments via bounty schemes, encouraging people to advertise the tokens on social media and utilize their audiences to recruit new members to Telegram and Discord channels connected to Tron.
The SEC claims that Sun has earned $31 million through the illicit sales of the cryptocurrency on the secondary market.
The SEC has already accused a number of famous people of the same securities offense. Kim Kardashian reached a $1.26 million settlement last year after promoting the cryptocurrency EthereumMax without revealing that she had been compensated for her efforts. According to the SEC’s investigation, Kardashian received a payment of $250,000 in exchange for a promotion. Paul Pierce, a Celtics Hall of Famer, reached a $1.4 million settlement without disclosing the $244,000 he received for promoting the same cryptocurrency.
Mahone and Soulja Boy have not yet come to an agreement. Yachty, Akon, and the other individuals mentioned have consented to pay reparations totaling more than $400,000.
A Lohan spokesman, Leslie Sloan, said that the celebrity was unaware of the disclosure requirement. Sloan stated, adding that Lindsay has agreed to pay the charge, “Lindsay was contacted in March 2022 and was unaware.”
According to Forbes, Sun instructed his staff to wash and trade 600,000 TRX illegally between April 2018 and February 2019, for a daily total of 4.5 million to 7.4 million TRX.