Rapper T.I. Charged With Promoting Fraudulent Initial Coin Offering

The Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) recently charged rapper T.I. (whose legal name is Clifford Harris, Jr.) with the promotion of two “unregistered and fraudulent” initial coin offerings in the crptocurrency FLiK and its trading platform CoinSpark.  The SEC alleges that T.I. “offered and sold FLiK tokens on his social media accounts, falsely claiming to be a FLiK co-owner and encouraging his followers to invest in the FLiK ICO.”  In reality, however, the creator of the cryptocurrency—with whom T.I. was working—was “secretly transferr[ing] FLiK tokens to himself and [selling] them into the market, reaping $2.2 million in profits, and [then engaging] in manipulative trading to inflate the price of SPARK tokens.”  T.I. has agreed to settle the charges by paying a $75,000 civil monetary penalty and is barred from participating in offerings or sales of digital-asset securities for at least five years.