Titanium Blockchain Infrastructure Services (TBIS) CEO Michael Alan Stollery pled guilty to securities fraud in connection with a $21 million cryptocurrency scheme. The Californian individual acknowledged fabricating information pertaining to the BAR currency, a crowdsourcing token that ought to have been registered with the US Securities and Exchange Commission but wasn’t.
One of the numerous shady initial coin offerings, or ICOs, in the late ’10s, was the TBIS fraud. The complaint alleges that between 2017 and 2018, Stollery established TBIS as a new business and promoted its coin with a series of intricate misleading promises.
TBIS promoted fictitious connections with organizations including Apple, Boeing, and IBM. Stollery allegedly responded, “I did not realize that a protocol would need to have been followed, etc.” to some of the “partners'” complaints.
The business also provided a number of purportedly branded services for which it had not filed trademark applications. (Perhaps more significantly, the TBIS-affiliated company appears to have been an IT contractor and equipment reseller rather than the services, which don’t seem to have existed.)
The list of these non-trademarks includes fascinating items like “Vordex,” purportedly a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency exchange, as well as painfully inane words like “business as a service,” which is regrettably also used outside of the field of blockchain scams.
To read our blog on “Blockchain startups are advised by investment bank Moelis & Co,” click here
.