Monday was a busy day for Centra Tech founders Raymond Trapani, Sohrab Sharma and Robert Farkas, who each found themselves indicted by a grand jury following accusations of attempted theft.
According to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the three men were allegedly planning to defraud their investors through a sale of the company’s tokens.
Following investigations, US Attorney Robert Khuzami revealed that authorities had recovered in excess of $60 million in funds from the three co-founders.
Trapani, Sharma, and Farkas have thus been charged with counts of conspiracy, the commission of securities, and wire fraud.
According to a statement released by The United States Attorney’s Office, Mr Khuzami said that the three men created: “a scheme to induce victims to invest millions of dollars’ worth of digital funds for the purpose of unregistered securities, in the form of digital currency tokens issued by Centra Tech.”
In addition to this, it is claimed that Trapani, Sharma, and Farkas also withheld important information regarding, in particular, the start-up’s claims about ties to payments companies, and in doing so, knowingly misled investors.
The token sale in question gained a large amount of attention following its endorsement by heavyweight boxer Floyd Mayweather, who claimed to have worked with Visa and Mastercard to create certain financial products. According to the SEC, however, such partnerships never actually existed.
The charges against the co-founders were first revealed in April 2018, when the US Securities and Exchange Commission initially filed fraud charges against Sharma and Farkas, before the Department of Justice made a case for criminal charges against all three of the men involved.
Sharma, Farkas, and Trapano are currently in custody pending further action from the courts.
