His ICO's included tokenized real estate assets and diamonds - except he never owned either. Now, he's going to jail...

The case involves 1 man, and 2 fraudulent ICOs, and we initially covered the story when it began in November of last year.   At the time he said he would be fighting the case, but yesterday he plead guilty to the charges against him.

His name is Maksim Zaslavskiy and he's the former CEO of 'REcoin' an ICO that claimed to be backed by tokenized real estate assets, and 'Diamond Reserve Club' an ICO that claimed to tokenize a reserve of physical diamonds.

But there was one massive problem, as his own guilty plea states:

“We had not yet purchased any real estate. We had not purchased any diamonds.”

Zaslavskiy's defense maintains that fraud was never the intent and that their client just did things in reverse, saying:

“This is a case where he had a good-faith belief in his cryptocurrency products, but he marketed it as further along than what had been actually developed.”

Nonetheless his pitch to investors implied he already owned the assets, not that he was raising money to acquire them.

Sentencing for Zaslavskiy will take place in April 18th of next year, where he can face a maximum of 37 months in prison.

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Author: Mark Pippen
London News Desk