The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has evolved as the leading regulator that gathered significant amounts of penalties from the cryptocurrency sector.

A litigation released by the SEC on September 23, 2024 states that it has charged Anthem Holdings Co.; and its CEO over the charges of defrauding investors. The documents note that the company and its head collectively fooled the investors resulting in a heist of over $5 million by offering two different securities.  

According to a complaint filed by the SEC in the U.S District Court for the District of Kansas from September 2020 and July 2022, “ Anthem Hayek Blanchard the CEO of Anthem Holdings, and the company itself made false and misleading claims to the investors raising around $5 million from 190+ investors in Series A equity offering.” 

Additionally, the SEC alleges that over $200k was raised by two investors separately in a “Pre-Series B” convertible note offering. The commission has charged Hayek and his company Anthem for violating the antifraud provision and Section 10 (b) of the Securities and Exchange Act 1934.  

Recent Lawsuits by the SEC

Since the beginning of 2024, several crypto-based companies have faced lawsuits from the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to recent information, the SEC has filed lawsuits against five companies and three individuals over the charges of involvement in a pig butchering scam. 

Pig butchering is a very bizarre term, and yet it tends to be a widespread type of scam in the cryptocurrency industry. In such a theft technique, the attacker usually contacts the victim online, through social networks, dating sites, or even via phone.

The vast cryptocurrency market has lost over $1 billion since the first day of 2024 till writing. Earlier this month the SEC sent a Wells notice to the biggest NFT marketplace OpenSea alleging that it sells unregistered securities over its platform.   

A person aware of the issue notes that the harsh attitude of SEC against OpenSea came following a demand by two NFT holders on the platform asserting that the NFTs over the platform are “worthless”.  

In 2020, the SEC asserted that Ripple raised $1.3 billion by selling XRP; the commission defined it as an unrestricted security. When writing, XRP was trading at $0.5853 with an intraday trading volume of $925,901,944, making it the 8th most traded in the market. 

Crypto Market Price Updates

As of writing the cryptocurrency market capitalization was $2.22 trillion with an intraday decline of 1.01%’ at the same time fear and greed index powered by CoinMarketCap was at 51 reflecting a neutral sentiment. 

Until publishing, Bitcoin was trading at $63,060 with a surge of 8.44% in the past seven days it dominated over 55% of the entire market. 

In the past 24 hours, Ethereum’s price fell 1.27% reaching $2,623 it is crucial to note that despite whale movement ETH has maintained the growing momentum growing over 14% in a week. 

The intraday gainer’s list is led by Celestia (TIA) as it surged 14.21% reaching $6.40, followed by Arweave (AR) trading at $22.40 with a growth of 13.21%. However, in the same time frame, Fantom (FTM) lost 6.60% reaching $0.6336 making it the intraday topper followed by Sei (SEI) at $0.3665 with a decline of 4.97%. 

Bitcoin, Wrapped Dog, and Ethereum remain the most visited cryptocurrencies on the market. 

In the past few months, 100s of new companies debuted on the market, but only a few of them are currently operating yet some of them have already exited the market fulfilling their motive to defraud innocent investors.