The Texas State Securities Board has served a cease and desist order to a fraudulent cryptocurrency company, according to an official document.

The company in question is called ECY Crypto, aka Exycrypto, and claims to be based in La Cité-Limoilou, Quebec. Also named in the complaint are three individuals related to the enterprise. They are Morgan Nolan, Rafael Logan, and Melissa Spring, the company’s promotions manager, business development manager, and strategy director respectively.

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These people do not appear on the company’s website. In fact, nobody does.

Looking at the website, the company appears to be confused as to what exactly it is offering to its “12,783” users. On the ‘about us’ page it claims to “provide hardware mining solutions and mining farm hosting to all kind of users,” but then goes on to say “many other Altcoins including Forex Trade.”

Another description reads: “The concept of EXYCRYPTO is Cryptofriendly and allows you to earn passively from the leading digital concepts.”

On one page you can find investment plans with guaranteed weekly payouts:

According to one testimonial, the company offers stocks and bonds trading too. ‘Emily’ writes: “When I sold my granny’s house, I started to think how I can invest the money I got. I was looking for ways to invest when a friend introduced me to ExyCrypto. Frankly speaking, I didn’t know much about Stock and Options Trading, but it seemed to be a realistic way to make money and get tangible profits. At first I had my doubts but as I was watching my account grow every day. Now, having made $90k of profit, I’m looking to invest anew and telling all my friends to the same.”

But wait, it gets even dodgier! On the terms and conditions page, you can find this paragraph:

Although in all fairness, at least these guys have the consideration to tell you in advance that they invent financial statistics when you trade binary options with them. This is not standard practice amongst binary options firms.

Cease and desist

According to the order, examples of activities with which the TSSB has taken issue include the following:

• The company has been advertising on LinkedIn, claiming that users will gain at least 10 percent profit per week.
• The company claims to be licensed in Canada.
• Nolan claims to be a UK citizen but is actually from Texas.
• All three defendants have been actively advertising the company via Whatsapp with false claims.
• The photographs in the testimonials are not actually customers of Exycrypto (!!!).
• The owners of the company have not been identified
• The company has not revealed any technical information about its mining activities

It deems Exycrypto to be fraudulently selling securities, and orders it to stop on pain of “a fine of not more than $5,000, or imprisonment in the penitentiary for not more than two years, or by both such fine and imprisonment.”

Sorry, Jahmal!

Don’t Mess With Texas

The TSSB has been very active in shooting down crypto-varmints, serving cease and desist orders to BitConnect and AriseBank in January alone.

In fact, in April it published the results of its investigation into 32 ventures that claimed to be associated somehow with cryptocurrency. It found that not one of them had a licence to sell securities, which is it how the authority defines tokens, that only eleven provided a physical address, and six appeared to be Ponzi schemes.

I’ll leave you with some words of advice from the Lone Star State: