While internal factors certainly leave the biggest impact on our growth, it shouldn’t mean that the external ones are any less important. In fact, there are times when the nature of our surroundings takes up a much larger significance than its counterpart, except that is also a drawback in itself. You see, at the very core, a human society is one volatile place, so putting all your chips on it can easily lead to some outright disastrous consequences. As if that wasn’t crazy enough, we also need to mention how much of this volatility emerges from our own actions. To contextualize the claim, we can look at all those instances where humans have kept their interests above everyone else’s. Situations of such nature would prompt the world to establish a strict regulatory rule throughout the spectrum. The move will come to life just the way we imagined it, but this utopia will be short-lived. Once ideas like technology takeover the landscape, maintaining efficient governance will become tricky beyond every metric, thus giving rule breakers all the room to exploit others. Fortunately, though, with government watchdogs getting more and more tech savvy over the recent past, it seems like we are finally heading in the right direction, and DoJ’s latest decision proves that big time.
Department of Justice has officially charged John and JonAtina Barksdale for defrauding retail investors by using a digital token named Ormeus Coin. According to certain reports, the siblings brazenly lied about the value and profitability of Ormeus Coin’s mining assets. Taking further SEC findings into consideration, John Barksdale duped over 20,000 investors to raise a staggering $124 million during the course of his unscrupulous operation. He did so through a shell company called Ormeus Global SA. Interestingly enough, to make the con a success, the siblings invested heavily in various promotional avenues, including social media, roadshows, other public events, and Times Square jumbotron, which they used to churn out false claims like “$250 Million Cryptocurrency Mining Farm Revealed in Legal Audit by Ormeus Coin.”
The Barksdales “acted as modern-day snake-oil salesmen” in misleading investors, said Melissa Hodgman, associate director of the SEC enforcement division. “We will continue to vigorously pursue persons who sell securities in schemes to defraud the investing public no matter what label the promoters apply to their products.”
Following the decision, John Barksdale has already been arrested for securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy charges. He faces upto 65 years in prison. If anything, the fate of crypto criminals will only get worse from here onwards, as US prepares to implement its first ever federal strategy on digital currency.