The co-founder and board of directors of cryptocurrency infrastructure platform Cere Network have been hit with a $100 million lawsuit for allegedly carrying out a pump-and-dump scheme that stole millions of dollars from investors.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco on Tuesday, Vivian Liu, who said she worked for and invested in the company, alleged that Cere co-founder Fred Jain, his brother, his wife and the company’s board of directors stole $41 million from investors.
According to the lawsuit, Jin promised before the platform’s public token launch in November 2021 that he and Cere’s early investors would not be able to sell their tokens and that they would be unlocked months later.
“While some employees and investors were ‘locked in’ to their Cere Tokens under the vesting schedule, Jin and his associates secretly sold over $41 million worth of Cere Tokens on multiple cryptocurrency exchanges and transferred those funds to their personal wallets immediately after the tokens were put into operation,” the complaint alleged.
The complaint is the second suit against Cere Network this month, after Cere co-founder Kenzi Wang sued Jin and the board on behalf of the company in Delaware on January 13, similarly alleging fraud.
Cointelegraph has contacted Siri and Gen for comment.
The latest complaint seeks $100 million in compensation
Liu’s lawsuit accused Jin of stealing investor funds “originally intended for Cere Network’s operations” and moving the money to shell companies and accounts that he and his alleged accomplices controlled while gambling millions of dollars on “risky cryptocurrency trades.”
It also alleged that Jin worked with GotBit, a market maker who was convicted of fraud and market manipulation in June, to use “sophisticated internet bots” that boosted token trading volumes to “hide the fraud.”
Liu argued in court that she was entitled to $100 million in compensation, “commensurate with the massive scale of the fraud.”
Kenzi Wang, co-founder of Cere, claims $58 million was misappropriated
Earlier in January, Cere co-founder Wang accused Jin in a Delaware court of orchestrating a scheme to “systematically embezzle more than $58 million” of the company’s assets.
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Wang claimed that Jin concealed the scheme “through fraudulent accounting, shell entities, and cryptocurrency ‘wash trading’” and accused Jin of causing “approximately $41.78 million in Cere tokens” to be transferred from the company’s treasury to personal accounts on cryptocurrency exchanges HTX and Kucoin.
Jin was also accused of providing “blatantly false financial statements to shareholders and advisors” and understating fundraising amounts by more than $21 million.
The Cere Network token (CERE) is currently trading for a fraction of a cent, down 99.9% from its peak of 47 cents in November 2021, according to CoinGecko.
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