The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has accused eleven people of creating and promoting the Forsage cryptocurrency pyramid, which has raised more than $300 million from investors from around the world.

The defendants include four Forsage founders living in Russia, Georgia and Indonesia, as well as several US citizens who promoted the fraudulent scheme online.

According to the SEC, in January 2020, Vladimir Okhotnikov, Mikhail Sergeev, Sergey Maslakov and Jane Doe (aka Lola Ferrari) launched the Forsage.io website. With its help, millions of retail investors can enter transactions via smart contracts running on Ethereum, Tron and Binance blockchains.

However, in fact, Forsage was a financial pyramid whose participants made a profit by attracting new investors, according to the SEC.

In 2020, the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission announced that Forsage has signs of a financial pyramid. In March 2021, Montana regulators also declared the project a fraudulent scheme.

Despite this, the SEC noted that the pyramid’s creators continued to promote it in videos on YouTube and in other ways, denying claims about it.

Dune Analytics estimates that 728,711 ETH was sent to the project.

Recall that in 2020, researchers noted that the activities of the Forsage Ponzi scheme caused an increase in commissions and gas prices on the Ethereum network.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also warned of Forsage scams, comparing the project to Bitconnect and Onecoin.

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