The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has unsealed a fraud complaint against Swedish citizen Roger Nils-Jonas Karlsson and associated firm Eastern Metal Securities (EMS), according to a press release on June 19.
According
to the DoJ Karlsson and EMS are charged with committing securities
fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. Specifically, Karlsson allegedly
instructed investors to pay for his products using virtual currencies, such as the cryptocurrency bitcoin (BTC).
According
to the complaint, the EMS website was registered to a made-up person,
and offered shares of “Pre Funded Reversed Pension Plan” of which
investors could allegedly purchase shares at $98 apiece. Karlsson
allegedly promised a payout of 1.15kg in gold (over $45,000 as of
January 2, 2019) per securities share.
However, an investigation by the IRS Criminal
Investigation unit reportedly concluded that Karlsson did not
demonstrably have the capital to back the promised payouts. However, he
did appear to have invested the money received in Thailand-based real estate.
Karlsson
has purportedly been running two websites, EMS and HCI25, to conduct
scam investment deals with no payout. He allegedly succeeded in
obtaining over $11 million from at least 3,575 investors via these
scams, which have been in operation since 2006.
According to the
report, Karlsson was arrested in Thailand on June 18, and the United
States is requesting extradition to try the purported scammer in the
Northern District of California.
Earlier this week, the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) filed a complaint against Control Finance Ltd, a now-defunct company from the United Kingdom that allegedly acquired almost $150 million through bitcoin-related fraud.
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