The creator of the AriseCoin cryptocurrency and the AriseBank platform, Jared Rice, who defrauded investors in the amount of more than $ 4 million, was sentenced to five years in prison.
As stated on the website of the US Department of Justice, this was announced by the acting US Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, Prerak Shah. At the end of 2018, the CEO of the cryptocurrency platform AriseBank, Jared Rice, was arrested, and in March 2019, he pleaded guilty to committing securities fraud and defrauding investors.
The AriseBank platform was positioned as “the world’s first decentralized banking platform”, on which it was possible to open bank accounts insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), as well as use Visa credit cards and cryptocurrency services based on AriseCoin.
It was later revealed that AriseBank had no right to conduct banking activities in Texas, customer accounts were not insured by the FDIC, and the project did not enter into a partnership with Visa. In addition to touting AriseBank’s non-existent benefits, Rice spent investor money on personal needs: hotel rooms, restaurant dinners, travel, and a family lawyer. Rice withheld this information from users, as well as the fact that he was previously the organizer of another fraudulent scheme on the Internet.
Meanwhile, several hundred investors bought AriseCoin for a total of about $ 4.25 million in BTC, ETH, LTC and fiat currencies. District Judge Ed Kinkeade sentenced Rice to five years in prison this week and ordered him to return all the money he received ($ 4,258,073) to investors.
