That’s when the company’s then-chief financial officer, Yaron Shalem, was charged in Israel in connection with an alleged crypto scam that Israeli police say defrauded victims around the world.
The alleged fraud predated Shalem’s days working for Celsius, but his arrest couldn’t have come at a worse time — just as the company had closed a $750 million funding round that valued it at $3.5 billion. In the months prior, Celsius had been hit with several cease and desist orders from regulators in New Jersey, New York, Kentucky, Alabama and Texas, demanding it stop selling its primary investment product because it was unregistered and in violation of state laws. Celsius had been paying high rates of interest to customers who kept their cryptocurrencies on the platform at a time when most investment products struggled to provide meaningful yields to investors.
Previously, it had emerged that the company’s former head of institutional lending from 2018 until 2020, who was in control of hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, had little background in finance or crypto, and had once worked in the porn industry.In recent months, the entire crypto market has been in free fall, with some leading currencies like bitcoin BTCUSD and ethereum plunging by more than 60%, and other blockchain-backed coins seeing their value evaporate completely.
“We are taking this necessary action for the benefit of our entire community in order to stabilize liquidity and operations while we take steps to preserve and protect assets,” the company said in a statement,
I have to stick to my principles and say that it was the thousands of people who voluntarily consented to losing their money.
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