EvilCorporations.com • Case No. 1:25-cv-4245, S.D.N.Y. • 61 min read

The Anatomy of a $100M Crypto Fraud

Unicoin, Inc. spent three years plastering “SEC-registered” claims on Times Square billboards, taxi cabs, airport screens, and bar coasters across America, while its executives privately knew the token was backed by nothing. The SEC’s 77-page complaint, filed May 20, 2025, documents the full machine: fabricated sales milestones, phantom real estate, fake appraisals, and internal messages that show the people at the top knew exactly what they were doing.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What This Actually Cost Real People

More than 5,000 people sent real money to Unicoin. They were not reckless gamblers. They were people who read that a cryptocurrency was “asset-backed,” “SEC-registered,” “U.S.-audited,” and “dividend-paying.” They saw those words on television commercials that ran on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNN. They saw them on the walls of airports in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, and Miami. They saw them on the digital screens inside their office building elevators. They saw them on coasters at bars they went to after work. The message was everywhere, and it was designed to feel official.

That feeling of legitimacy was the product. Unicoin spent $17.8 million on marketing in 2022 alone — more than it was legitimately collecting from investors that entire year. The marketing budget was not about building a product. It was about creating the visual impression of a major, credible institution so that ordinary people would override their skepticism and hand over their savings.

For every person who invested, there is a specific calculation they made. Maybe they were a retiree who had watched Bitcoin make other people wealthy and wanted a chance at something similar — but “safer,” because this one was “backed by real assets.” Maybe they were a young person who scraped together enough for a small position because the ads said returns could reach 9,000,000%. Maybe they were someone with connections to Latin America or Southeast Asia who felt reassured that Unicoin was acquiring properties in Argentina and Thailand — places they recognized. Unicoin targeted all of them.

The fraud worked by exploiting a specific, legitimate fear: that crypto is too volatile. The Promoting Defendants positioned Unicoin as the answer to that fear. They called Bitcoin “assetless” and positioned Unicoin as the mature, responsible alternative — backed by copper mines, Caribbean islands, Thai resorts. The lie was engineered to convert the most cautious potential investors, the ones who had hesitated precisely because they were careful with their money.

What investors actually purchased was a promise to receive a token that has never been distributed. Not a coin. Not a share of real estate. Not a stake in a company. A certificate saying that if Unicoin ever got around to minting the token, and if the company decided to distribute it, the holder might receive some. And under the “Five Year Plan” that Unicoin used to inflate its sales figures, most investors were not even obligated to pay the full amount they “pledged.” Unicoin counted those unpaid pledges as completed sales anyway, and then held press conferences and sent out email blasts announcing how well they were doing.

The Argentine copper mine that was supposed to back the token was bought for Unicoin Rights Certificates — not cash — and then announced as a $150 million asset backing investors’ holdings. The actual appraisal, conducted 15 months later, came in at $7.1 million. By the time the company’s own auditor brought in a specialist, the number had dropped to $580,000. Investors in Unicoin were told their holdings were backed in part by an asset that turned out to be worth less than a studio apartment in Manhattan.

When Unicoin’s vice president of investor experience warned in a July 2023 internal message that investors were not planning to make their payments and that the company could be looking at an “unrecovered debt of $117,886,905,” the executives did not stop making milestone announcements. They kept going. In February 2024, the CEO and chief investment officer sat down for a paid promotional interview — which was not disclosed as an advertisement — and told the audience that investors had already put “$2 billion” into Unicoin.

There is no settlement count in this complaint yet. There is no final victim tally. What exists is a lawsuit, filed three years after the scheme began, in a federal courthouse in Manhattan. For the 5,000-plus people who invested, the math is simple: they gave real money, and they got a certificate for a token that does not yet exist, backed by assets the company’s own sworn testimony confirms were never intended to back anything.

Legal Receipts: What They Said Under Oath and On Camera

The following are verbatim quotes drawn directly from the SEC complaint (Case 1:25-cv-04245), which itself cites sworn testimony, internal communications, public statements, and SEC filings. Each quote is followed by a breakdown of what it proves.

On the “Asset-Backed” Claim

“Unicoin is assets-backed, dividend-paying, regulations-compliant, publicly reporting, and audited.” — Alexander Konanykhin, CEO, in a December 20, 2023, paid promotional interview with Firm 1, posted publicly and circulated via Investor Update.

• This statement was made more than a year and a half into the fraud, after the company’s own CFO had already advised in February 2022 that executives should not claim Unicoin was “backed by a fund since a fund has not been technically set up.”
• Neither Konanykhin nor the media firm disclosed that this interview was a paid advertisement, meaning viewers had no reason to treat it as commercial speech.
• The same claim appeared in multiple subsequent paid interviews through March 2024, demonstrating this was not a one-time mistake but a deliberate, repeated strategy.

“So we don’t say, you know, the coin [Unicoin] is backed by assets.” — Alejandro Dominguez, Chief Investment Officer, under sworn testimony.

• This sworn admission directly contradicts Dominguez’s own public statement at a blockchain conference in August 2022, where he told the audience, “We’re going to be asset backed by different global emerging growth companies from all over the world.”
• Dominguez delivered that conference speech in front of a projected graphic reading: “Unicoin is an equity-backed, dividend-paying cryptocurrency.” His own legal testimony confirms that claim was not true.
• Dominguez also testified that the coin was not backed by assets at the same time he was serving as chief investment officer overseeing the company’s “140% program” — the program used to acquire properties presented to investors as backing the coin.

“[Unicoin tokens] cannot be backed by something or reporting, et cetera.” — Alexander Konanykhin, CEO, under sworn testimony, comparing cryptocurrency to a bottle of water.

• This admission under oath is the clearest possible evidence that the company’s entire marketing premise — a “safer” crypto backed by real-world assets — was known by the CEO to be structurally impossible by his own understanding, yet he continued making the claim publicly for years.
• Unicoin’s PPMs, investor updates, press releases, and advertisements all used “asset-backed” as the primary differentiating selling point through at least February 2025. Konanykhin signed every investor update personally, under his name and title.

“To date, we have already sold over $2 billion worth of Unicoins. Asset-backed, we’re at about 1.4 billion in real estate that we have actually swapped pre-ICO Unicoins for real estate all over the world.” — Alejandro Dominguez, February 29, 2024, paid promotional interview.

• This statement was false on both counts: the company had raised at most $110 million total, not $2 billion; and the real estate assets claimed to back the coin were, as the SEC’s complaint documents in detail, largely unclosed transactions with grossly inflated valuations.
• Konanykhin affirmed this statement in the same interview, saying “investors have already invested $2 billion in Unicoin,” adding his personal endorsement to Dominguez’s false claim.
• Neither Dominguez nor Konanykhin disclosed that this was a paid advertisement. The interview was then posted to Unicoin’s website and circulated in an investor update.

On the Bahamas Deal and the Convicted Felon Warning

“All these guys sound pretty shady. They don’t want to be on video, etc. And we already know [the Bahamas Entities’ representative] is a little shady. So I went ahead and Googled them and there you go. Incredible. But I don’t know. Definitely don’t think we should do any business with these people. . . . They’re gonna send us some proposition for $400 million worth of the land in the Bahamas. Who knows if they even own it.” — Alejandro Dominguez, WhatsApp voice message to Konanykhin, September 8, 2023.

• Dominguez sent this message after sharing a Department of Justice press release identifying a key associate in the Bahamas deal as someone who had been sentenced to 12.5 years in prison for defrauding more than 100 investors out of over $8 million in a Bahamas land development scheme.
• Unicoin’s own CFO, upon receiving the same DOJ press release, responded: “Why would we want to do a land for tokens asset swap with a known felon that defrauded investors? Why would we take that risk?”
• Despite Dominguez’s explicit recommendation against proceeding and the CFO’s objection, Defendants continued to pursue and ultimately announced the Bahamas acquisition. As of the 2024 annual report filed April 15, 2025, the deal had still not closed.

On the Antigua Valuation

“The real value of what [the Antigua Properties seller’s representative] offers may indeed be under $40M.” — Alexander Konanykhin, WhatsApp message to Dominguez, September 22, 2023.

• Konanykhin wrote this message less than four weeks before publicly announcing the acquisition of the Antigua Properties at a stated value of $680 million.
• On October 23, 2023 — the very same day Unicoin’s Instagram, LinkedIn, and X accounts posted that it had acquired “$680M Coastal Caribbean Paradise” — the local Antiguan appraiser Dominguez had contacted provided a price opinion valuing the properties at $50 million.
• The SEC complaint states the actual market value of the Antigua Properties was no more than $89 million. Unicoin publicly claimed $680 million while its own CEO’s private communications showed he believed the real number might be under $40 million.

On the Five Year Plan Inflation

“That means we could be looking at an unrecovered debt of $117,886,905.” — Unicoin’s Vice President of Investor Experience, WhatsApp message to the Promoting Defendants, July 26, 2023.

• This message informed the Promoting Defendants that investors holding 38% of all “Five Year Plan” agreements had payments coming due in September or October 2023 — and that most of them did not intend to pay.
• The Five Year Plan allowed investors to secure a position with only a 20% collateral deposit, with no legal obligation to make the remaining payments. Unicoin nevertheless counted the full five-year pledge amount in its published sales figures — inflating claimed revenue by up to five times the actual cash received.
• After receiving this warning, the Promoting Defendants continued to announce escalating milestones, reaching their peak claim of “$3 billion in Unicoin sales” in June 2024.

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health: The Trust Economy and Who Gets Hurt

Fraud of this scale does not only take money. It takes the social infrastructure that allows ordinary people to participate in financial markets at all.

• The 5,000-plus investors defrauded by Unicoin span the United States and international markets. The SEC complaint does not specify a median investment size, but with $100 million raised across 5,000 investors, average exposure runs to roughly $20,000 per person — a sum large enough to represent a meaningful portion of savings, retirement capital, or emergency funds for working and middle-class households.
• The fraud specifically targeted cautious investors — people skeptical of crypto volatility who were drawn in by the promise of “safer,” “asset-backed” alternatives. This demographic skew means the scheme likely concentrated harm among risk-averse older investors who were least equipped to absorb the loss.
• Unicoin ran television ads on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNN, and plastered the “SEC-registered” claim on billboards in Times Square and across U.S. airports. The saturation of this false legitimacy signal means that even people who did not invest were exposed to a deliberate campaign to normalize a fraudulent product, degrading public trust in regulatory language.
• The Five Year Plan’s design — advertising “no credit risk: pay only if satisfied with our progress” — was psychologically engineered to lower investor caution. The scheme specifically removed the friction that normally protects people from making commitments they will regret, then used their pledges to manufacture fake credibility signals that drove further investment.

Economic Inequality: The Architecture of Who Loses

Securities fraud is not a victimless crime against abstract capital markets. It transfers wealth from ordinary people to insiders, while insiders face lower risk by design.

• Unicoin spent $17.8 million on marketing in 2022 — the year it raised a documented $37.5 million. More than 47 cents of every investor dollar went straight to advertising designed to extract the next dollar. This is not a business model; it is a redistribution mechanism that moves money from investors to media companies, ad agencies, and insiders while creating the appearance of a growing enterprise.
• The Promoting Defendants were awarded Unicoin Rights Certificates “indistinguishable from those sold to investors” — meaning they personally held instruments whose stated value rose and fell alongside those they were selling to the public, while simultaneously knowing the instruments were not asset-backed and the sales figures were fabricated. Insiders held the same paper while possessing information that invalidated its premise.
• Konanykhin owned 36% and Moschini owned 36.6% of Unicoin’s common stock. When the company raised funds — real funds — those flows went through an entity controlled almost entirely by two people. The SEC complaint notes that in 2024 alone, Unicoin’s sales and marketing expenses exceeded $14 million, while the total real proceeds across the entire fraud period topped out at $110 million. The structural outcome is capital extraction from retail investors into a company whose primary output was its own promotional material.
• The “140% program” was designed to take real assets — land and property owned by sellers — and exchange them for Unicoin Rights Certificates, which were not backed by anything real and whose value was sustained entirely by false sales claims. In at least the cases of Argentina, Thailand, Antigua, and the Bahamas, sellers accepted Unicoin tokens in exchange for real or claimed real property, while the token’s stated backing was a fabrication known to executives.
• The use of undisclosed paid promotional interviews with “Firm 1” placed fraudulent claims in editorial-seeming contexts on news-media-adjacent platforms. This tactic exploits the informational asymmetry between media-sophisticated actors (Unicoin’s executives) and ordinary viewers who lack the tools to distinguish paid content from independent journalism — a form of epistemic exploitation that falls disproportionately on people with less financial education.

What Now: Who Is Accountable and What You Can Do

The SEC’s complaint names four defendants and is seeking permanent injunctions, disgorgement of all ill-gotten gains, civil penalties, and lifetime officer-and-director bars. Here is the current state of accountability and what matters next.

The Named Defendants

• Alexander Konanykhin, CEO of Unicoin (2015–present), Chairman of the Board (March 2024–present), 36% stockholder. Charged with violations of Securities Act Sections 5(a), 5(c), and 17(a), and Exchange Act Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5. Facing personal liability as a control person for Unicoin’s violations under Exchange Act Section 20(a). Current residence listed as unknown.
• Maria Silvina Moschini, President and former Chairwoman of Unicoin’s Board, 36.6% stockholder, CEO of Unicorns, Inc. Charged with violations of Securities Act Section 17(a) and Exchange Act Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5. Current residence listed as unknown.
• Alejandro Dominguez, former Chief Investment Officer, Miami, Florida. Charged with violations of Securities Act Section 17(a) and Exchange Act Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5.
• Richard Devlin, SVP and General Counsel, Atglen, Pennsylvania. Charged with violations of Securities Act Sections 17(a)(2) and 17(a)(3) for his role in drafting the fraudulent PPMs.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies with Jurisdiction

• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): The lead plaintiff. Filed Case No. 1:25-cv-04245 in the Southern District of New York on May 20, 2025. The SEC’s Enforcement Division is the primary accountability mechanism here. Track filings at PACER (pacer.gov) using the case number.
• U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ): Criminal referral from SEC enforcement actions is possible in fraud cases involving knowing misrepresentation at this scale. The DOJ’s Securities and Financial Fraud Unit and U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York have concurrent jurisdiction over securities fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1348.
• Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA): Has issued guidance on crypto asset fraud and digital asset securities. Investor complaints can be submitted at finra.org/investors/have-problem.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB): Accepts complaints about financial products and consumer financial fraud at consumerfinance.gov/complaint.
• State Securities Regulators (NASAA): The North American Securities Administrators Association coordinates with state-level regulators who have independent authority over securities sold to residents of their states. File complaints at your state’s securities regulator. Find yours at nasaa.org.
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Handles reports of deceptive advertising, including undisclosed paid promotional content. The undisclosed paid interviews with “Firm 1” may constitute violations of FTC endorsement guidelines. Report at ftc.gov/complaint.

Action Steps for Affected Investors and Concerned Citizens

• If you invested in Unicoin Rights Certificates: Contact the SEC’s Office of Investor Education and Advocacy at investor.gov or call 1-800-SEC-0330. Document all communications, certificates, and payment records. Preserve screenshots of any representations made to you about asset backing, SEC registration, or sales milestones.
• File a tip with the SEC Whistleblower Program (sec.gov/whistleblower): If you have inside knowledge of Unicoin’s operations, financial records, or communications not covered in the complaint, the SEC Whistleblower Office offers financial awards of 10–30% of sanctions over $1 million, and protections against retaliation.
• Monitor the case docket: Case 1:25-cv-04245, Southern District of New York. Public access via PACER (pacer.gov). The SEC is seeking disgorgement of all ill-gotten gains — meaning whatever is recovered goes back to harmed investors.
• Support local crypto fraud legal aid: Organizations like the National Consumer Law Center (nclc.org) and your state’s legal aid society can help victims of investment fraud navigate civil claims, especially in cases where individual losses are below the threshold for private legal action.
• Demand platform accountability: Unicoin ran paid promotional content as editorial interviews on media platforms without disclosure. Contact the FTC and the platforms themselves (CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNN, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal) to demand enforcement of sponsorship disclosure rules. These platforms had a responsibility to verify the claims in the content they accepted payment to host.
• Organize locally: Investors in New York, Florida, and other high-density targeting areas (evidenced by the NYC taxi, airport, and bus wrap advertising campaigns) may benefit from local organizing to pool resources, share information, and coordinate with class-action attorneys. Crypto fraud cases at this scale have historically supported class certification. Connect with investor advocacy groups in your area.