The United States SEC has gotten permission from the New York Eastern District Court to take action against Dominic Lacroix, a man who has been implicated as one of the individuals behind the alleged $15 million PlexCoin scam.
Lacroix and his accomplice, Sabrina Paradis-Royer, reportedly managed to rake in their millions by selling ICO tokens with eye-popping promises of returns.
The legal battle against these two has already been in the works for several months, and the US government wasn’t the first to come after the pair. Cryptovest reported that the two had been ordered by a Canadian court to cease and desist. To be fair, they did shut down their operations in Canada in response--however, they also picked up and moved their scheme to the US shortly after.
The SEC Moved in Quickly
It was the pair’s caper in Canada that put the US government hot on Plexcoin’s trail. The SEC filed a charge against the Plexcoin token sale, the first time that the agency’s cyber unit had taken such an action against an ICO.
At the time, Plexcoin clapped back at the Commission, filing a motion that said that the SEC was “engaged in a tremendous overreach, toward persons who are not subject to personal jurisdiction in this judicial district, and toward transactions that are excluded from Regulation under U.S. federal securities laws.”
The Cryptocurrency PlexCoin $PLX sheds by -9.09% for a day https://t.co/HEI7aYukt1
— Wolcott Daily (@stocknewsweek) May 4, 2018
The motion also alleged that “in order for a U.S. person to obtain PlexCoin, that person would have to lie, misrepresent their status as a U.S. person, and thus make Payments to non-U.S. entities to acquire a non-U.S.-domiciled cryptocurrency through a transaction consummated outside the U.S.” A strange statement, given that the pair behind Plexcoin very deliberately moved their company’s operations to the United States.
Eventually, the pair filed for a dismissal of the SEC’s charges; it was not granted. Instead, the SEC summoned Paradis-Royer and Lacroix to come in for questioning by April 30th. They did not come. Now, the SEC has ordered a deposition in New York.
