 | Josh Garza, the former CEO of a cryptocurrency company has been sentenced to prison and ordered to pay $9.1 million in restitution. He ran a major ponzi scheme that cost hundreds of investors millions of dollars. A judge in Connecticut sentenced 33-year-old Garza to a 21-month prison sentence followed by six months of house arrest. His ponzi scheme – called PayCoin – was based on investors claiming a portion of another company’s bitcoin mining profits. |  The scheme ran from May 2014 to January of 2015 through four companies owned by Garza. |
 | Last week, a federal judge ruled that Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) fall under the umbrella of securities offerings. This opens the gates for the SEC to move against ICO operations. They quickly charged TokenLot, a self-described ICO superstore, and Crypto Asset Management, a scheme that falsely claimed it was the first fully regulatory compliant crypto hedge fund. |  |
