Class action lawsuits have been filed in the United States against Binance, Block.One, BitMEX, TRON and other crypto companies

On Friday, the American law firm Roche Cyrulnik Freedman has filed a series of class-action lawsuits against the largest representatives of the cryptocurrency industry, including Binance, Block.One, BitMEX and TRON. They are accused of deceiving investors by illegally selling securities in the form of digital tokens. This is what the website Offshore Alert writes about.

In total, 42 defendants from the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Seychelles, Malta, Canada, China, Estonia, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United States and Viet Nam are mentioned in the lawsuits.

A total of 11 lawsuits have been filed in the District Court of the Southern District of New York. All of them are shared by a common argument: Token issuers took advantage of the misunderstanding of cryptocurrency by investors and illegally distributed securities to US citizens.

According to the plaintiffs, these companies presented their tokens as having practical value, that exempted them from registration requirements. Many of them compared tokens to bitcoin and ether, which also do not require registration as securities. Investors could not have known that issuers should register their tokens with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the lawyers claimed.

In addition to the above-mentioned companies, the lawsuits include KuCoin, Quantstamp, Bibox, KayDex, Status, BProtocol and Civic, and also private individuals that represent them, including Brendan Blumer, Dan Larimer, Vinny Lingham and Changpeng Zhao.

The lawsuits allege that the above-mentioned crypto-exchanges conducted unregistered securities sales and engaged in market manipulation, and token issuers hid information from investors that their tokens were securities.

Tokens Bibox (BIX), Eos (EOS), Bancor (BNT), Status (SNT), Quantstamp (QSP), Kyber Network (KNC), Tron (TRX), Funfair (FUN), Icon (ICX), OmiseGO (OMG), ETHLend (LEND), Aelf (ELF), TomoChain (TOMO) и Civic (CVC) they are among the crypto assets that the plaintiffs claim are securities.

The plaintiffs argue that the tokens of these companies are not tested by Howey Test, which should be recognized as securities in accordance with the U.S. law. In particular, they point to such a key characteristic of an investment contract as investing money in a single enterprise with reasonable expectations of profits from the actions of third parties. The persons associated with the promotion of such tokens were part of a single enterprise and unambiguously allowed them to count on making a profit in the future, they argue. Now investors want to receive compensation for losses in the amount determined by the court.

Lawsuit against SCAM Binance Exchange

Binance is accused of selling of 12 titles unlicensed securities, including EOS, Bancor (BNT) and Status (SNT). 
 
"Binance and issuers have been involved in millions of transactions illegally, including attracting, offering and selling securities without registering them as such. Binance is not registered with the SEC as an exchange or broker-dealer," said in the lawsuit.
 
The document considers each token in turn and explains why it is a security. The lawsuit is filed on behalf of Binance users who purchased these tokens. The number of affected investors is measured in tens of thousands of people. Lawyers demand compensation for losses from token purchases at Binance over the last three years. Right now, multibillion-dollar fines are predicted for Binance, which the illegal casino exchange of Binance will have to pay as part of class action lawsuits.
 
Lawyer's opinion

If the court recognizes one or more of these tokens as securities, exchanges and issuers may not only suffer large monetary losses, but may also be subject to further prosecution for their violations. The defendants will probably try to challenge the charges against them, but the American court system already knows of at least one case in which a judge has upheld similar arguments. During the ongoing Telegram proceedings with the SEC, the judge barred the issuer from distributing the Gram tokens, recognizing the plaintiff’s position justified. .
 
Attorney Stephen Palley believes that the main task of plaintiffs is to hold these companies accountable under U.S law, as many of them are outside the United States.
 
"Personally, I doubt that admitting a significant number of these tokens as securities under US law. In my initial reasoning, the arguments in these claims are not empty. This litigation will provide employment for a large number of lawyers for years to come and may be a harbinger of other similar claims in the future,” he writes.   шаблоны для dle 11.2