Two founders of cryptocurrency offering arrested, charged with fraud

Enlarge / The US Securities and Exchange Commission seal hangs on the facade of its building September 18, 2008 in Washington, DC. (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The creators of an initial coin offering (ICO) once endorsed by Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled have been arrested and indicted on separate federal securities fraud charges brought by federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Earlier this year, the SEC shut down another ICO, known as AriseBank.

In 2017, according to the SEC, Sohrab "Sam" Sharma and Robert Farkas, who founded Centra Tech, managed to raise $32 million from thousands of people for their "CTR Token," an Ether-based coin.

The organizers had claimed in 2017 that they had a Visa and MasterCard debit card service that would allow users to "instantly convert hard-to-spend cryptocurrencies"-but no such relationship with those companies apparently existed.

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