The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a lawsuit against crypto company Unicoin Inc. and several of its top executives, alleging a large-scale investor fraud involving unregistered and misleading securities offerings worth over $100 million.
The complaint, lodged in the Southern District of New York on May 20, names Unicoin CEO Alex Konanykhin, board member Maria Silvina Moschini, and former Chief Investment Officer Alex Dominguez as central figures in the scheme. According to the SEC, the company promoted “rights certificates” tied to a future digital asset — the Unicoin token — and falsely claimed they were backed by a multi-billion-dollar portfolio of global real estate and pre-IPO equity.
Contrary to the company’s marketing claims, the SEC contends that many of the real estate deals highlighted — located in Argentina, Thailand, and the Caribbean — never materialized. The total estimated value of the actual backing assets stood at no more than $300 million, a far cry from the billions advertised.
The regulatory agency further alleges that Unicoin exaggerated its fundraising success, promoting a figure of $3 billion when it had, in fact, raised only around $110 million from more than 5,000 investors worldwide.
Despite these shortcomings, the firm reportedly presented its offerings as being SEC-compliant or “U.S. registered,” even though the rights certificates were never filed with the Commission and failed to meet any legal exemption requirements. Additional violations stem from Unicoin’s use of airdrops to distribute tokens without confirming investor accreditation status — a move the SEC claims further undermined federal securities law.
Konanykhin is also accused of directly selling nearly 38 million rights certificates to individuals who had previously been excluded in a bid to maintain the company’s legal cover.
Unicoin’s General Counsel Richard Devlin, also named in the lawsuit, has reached a settlement with the SEC. Without admitting or denying the charges, Devlin agreed to a permanent injunction and a civil penalty of $37,500.
In related news, the US SEC officially dismissed its long-standing case against Ian Balina, a prominent cryptocurrency influencer and the founder of AI-driven investment platform Token Metrics.
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