- US SEC sues Richard Heart and three of his projects for unregistered sale of securities and fraud
- The commission claimed that Heart used investors’ money to purchase luxury goods including the world’s largest black diamond
The United States Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) continues to take action against crypto projects despite its partial loss against Ripple. This time, the regulatory authority launched a lawsuit against Richard Heart alias Richard Schueler, a well-known crypto content creator.
The legal action also extends to his projects – PulseChain, an Ethereum fork, PulseX, a Uniswap fork, and HEX, an ERC20 token.
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The commission alleges that Heart and his projects violated the securities law by “conducting unregistered offerings,” which raised over $1 billion. The regulatory authority also brought in additional fraud charges against Heart and Pulsechain.
It claimed they “misappropriated at least $12 million of offering proceeds” to buy luxury goods. The purchased items included “‘The Enigma’ – reportedly the largest black diamond in the world.”
The Director of the Fort Worth Regional Officer, Eric Werner, said, “Heart called on investors to buy crypto asset securities in offerings that he failed to register. He then defrauded those investors by spending some of their crypto assets on exorbitant luxury goods”. The officer further added,
“This action seeks to protect the investing public and hold Heart accountable for his actions.”
SEC alleges securities offerings
Notably, while speaking about the offerings of HEX, PulseX, and Pulsechain, the SEC claimed all three were securities. Additionally, the action against Pulsechain comes just a few months after its fork from Ethereum, which was on 12 May 2023. Meanwhile, PulseX was branched out of Uniswap on May 12th, 2023.
The price of HEX plummeted drastically since the SEC disclosed its action against the project and its creator. According to CoinMarketCap, HEX was trading at $0.006255 at press time and registered a slump of over 16% in the past hour.
Meanwhile, the 24-hour chart recorded a downfall of over 29% and the 7-day chart moved on a similar trend with a fall of over 28 percent.
The trend seems to be similar for Pulsechain [PLS] and PulseX [PLSX]. PLS was trading at $0.00007546 and had registered a slump of over 25 percent in the past day.
At the same time, PLSX was trading at $0.0000213 with over 30 percent loss in the past 24 hours. Additionally, neither Richard Heart nor any of the alleged projects released a statement on the latest action.
