- The infamous creator of the McAfee antivirus has been sued by the SEC for taking $23 million in profit from promoting ICO projects without revealing he got paid for it.
John McAfee has already been running from the U.S. authorities for years, living internationally. He also is running for the 2020 presidential campaign in the U.S. even though McAfee doesn’t live there.
The charges state that McAfee did ‘not disclose that he was being paid to promote the ICOs by the issuers’. Back in 2017 and early 2018, thousands of ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) were being launched. John McAfee was notorious for pumping cryptocurrencies with just one tweet.
McAfee falsely claimed to be an investor and/or a technical advisor when he recommended several ICOs, creating the impression that he had vetted these companies, that they were benefiting from his technical expertise, and that he was willing to invest his own money in the ventures. In reality, McAfee’s tweets were paid promotions disguised as impartial investment advice.
The complaint is 55 pages long and can be read in full here. It also talks about McAfee using scalping to generate even further profits.
Finally, McAfee engaged in a practice known as ‘scalping’ as to at least one digital asset security, by accumulating large amounts of the digital asset security and touting it on Twitter without disclosing his intent to sell it. Scalping generally allows promoters to sell their securities holdings quickly and profitably through market interest that they deceptively generate, and violates the federal securities laws.
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