A man changed his beverage company’s name to include the word “blockchain,” the stock shot up nearly 200% overnight, and his alleged inside man cashed out $162,500 (roughly three years of groceries for an average American family) in under two hours.

The Blockchain Name-Change Hustle

How Long Island Iced Tea Corp. allegedly used a buzzword, a stock promoter, and a secret tip to fleece everyday investors — and why the man at the center of it spent years hiding in Ibiza.

They Didn’t Invent Blockchain. They Invented a Headline.

In late December 2017, the word “blockchain” was the most powerful word in finance. Bitcoin was approaching $20,000. Every company that bolted the word onto its press release watched its stock double, triple, or more. The executives at Long Island Iced Tea Corp. knew this. And according to the SEC, they used that knowledge to hand a quiet gift to the right people before the public ever saw it coming.

The SEC alleges that Eric J. Watson, a controlling shareholder and corporate insider at Long Island Iced Tea Corp. (LTEA), tipped off a business associate named Oliver-Barret Lindsay with non-public draft announcements about the company’s planned pivot from soft drinks to blockchain technology. Lindsay then passed that information to Gannon Giguiere, a stock promoter who happened to own a stock promotion website. Watson allegedly sought Giguiere’s help in promoting LTEA in exchange for this access.

This is insider trading reduced to its bare bones: a person at the top of a company whispers a secret to someone outside it, that person bets on the secret, and ordinary investors absorbing the news from a press release are left holding the bag.

The 48-Hour Money Machine

On December 20, 2017, Giguiere purchased 35,000 LTEA shares at an average price of $2.42 per share. He did this the day before the announcement went public. On December 21, 2017, LTEA publicly declared its pivot to blockchain. The trading volume exploded. The share price closed that day at $6.91 per share. That is a gain of approximately 185% in a single trading session.

Less than two hours after the announcement, Giguiere sold every single share he had purchased the day before. The SEC calculates his illicit profits at $162,500 (roughly three years of groceries for an average American family of four, or more than a year of rent for many American households). Two hours. One tip. One press release. Done.

Both Lindsay and Giguiere have since settled with the SEC. Lindsay’s consent judgment was entered on September 20, 2024. Giguiere’s was entered on December 28, 2023. Watson remains the only defendant still fighting the case.

London. Ibiza. Nowhere. The Years-Long Hunt for Eric Watson.

The SEC filed its complaint on July 9, 2021. One week later, Watson was already talking to the press. The New Zealand Herald quoted him on July 16, 2021, saying “Yes, it appears the SEC has filed a complaint.” He knew. He just refused to be served.

A person claiming to represent Watson contacted the SEC on July 26, 2021, confirmed Watson was in Europe, and then refused to accept legal service on his behalf. Watson, described as a New Zealand citizen believed to be living in London at the time of the complaint, was reportedly traced to Ibiza, Spain, through court-appointed liquidators in New Zealand handling a separate company failure. Spain’s Central Authority made two attempts to serve Watson at that Ibiza address. Both failed.

Three attorneys who represented Watson in a UK lawsuit were contacted. Two denied representing him. One never responded. Two separate law firms contacted the SEC after the default was entered, indicating interest in settlement talks on Watson’s behalf. No lawyer ever formally appeared for him in the case. Watson eventually appeared on June 14, 2024, more than three years after the complaint was filed, and declared he would represent himself.

The SEC Had to Take Out a Newspaper Ad to Find Him

With every conventional method exhausted, the court authorized the SEC to serve Watson by publishing a legal notice in The International New York Times once a week for four consecutive weeks. The publications ran on October 28, November 3, November 9, and November 14, 2022. Watson had until December 5, 2022 to respond. He did not.

The court found this service legally valid. Federal precedent holds that a person with Watson’s “significant business experience” can reasonably be expected to read The International New York Times, a publication historically described as “widely read by the international financial community in Europe.” The court also cited Watson’s own admitted knowledge of the complaint. He knew. He just chose not to engage for years.

What the Settlement Math Doesn’t Count

Court documents reduce everything to figures. Share prices. Profit amounts. Filing dates. But the machinery of a stock pump scheme leaves damage that never shows up in a settlement ledger, and that damage lands on real people who had nothing to do with the boardroom decisions that caused it.

When LTEA announced its “pivot to blockchain” on December 21, 2017, ordinary retail investors responded the way they were supposed to respond to a public company announcement: they bought. They trusted the news. The share price nearly tripling in a single session did not happen because of genuine discovery of value. It happened because a wave of regular people, many of them chasing the crypto mania of late 2017, treated that announcement as a legitimate signal. Every share bought by an ordinary investor on December 21 at or near the $6.91 close was a share bought from someone who already knew the game was over. Giguiere was selling to them. They just did not know it.

The SEC’s complaint covers one promoter, one tip, one transaction window. What it does not cover is the person who held those shares through the inevitable collapse that follows every pump. Long Island Iced Tea Corp. did not build a blockchain business. It added a word to its name. That word eventually stopped working, the way buzzwords always do. The stock did not stay at $6.91. The ordinary investors who bought into the headline were left holding shares in a beverage company that had simply changed its name. They absorbed losses that were engineered before they ever heard about it.

There is also the question of what it costs a market when trust erodes. Every incident like this one teaches retail investors a lesson: that the press release they read, the company name change they notice, the buzzword they see attached to a stock ticker could be a setup. The crypto boom of 2017 was already producing legitimate innovation alongside rampant manipulation. Schemes like this one poisoned the well. They made every blockchain announcement suspect. They made it harder for honest companies to raise capital and harder for ordinary investors to distinguish signal from noise. That damage is diffuse, invisible in court filings, and permanent.

They Said This Out Loud. In Court. On the Record.

“Watson allegedly tipped a business associate, Oliver-Barret Lindsay, with material nonpublic information about LTEA’s forthcoming announcement that it would significantly pivot its business from soft drink manufacturing to blockchain technology.” — SEC Complaint, as cited in the Court’s Opinion and Order, June 30, 2025

“Less than two hours after the announcement, Giguiere sold all the LTEA shares he purchased the previous day, purportedly realizing $162,500 in illicit profits.” — SEC Complaint ¶ 81, as cited in the Court’s Opinion and Order, June 30, 2025

“Section 21(g) thus functions as an absolute bar against the consolidation of counterclaims in Commission enforcement proceedings when the Commission does not consent to such consolidation, as it does not here.” — SEC’s Memorandum of Law, ECF No. 102 at 22, quoted in the Court’s Opinion and Order, June 30, 2025

“Watson also notes that the SEC stated to him that ‘nobody, not you or anyone, is by law allowed to counter-sue the SEC,’ which he construes as ‘an unjustified and overly broad interpretation of the law, aimed at intimidating Watson and discouraging him from pursuing his legal rights.'” — Watson’s Motion, ECF No. 98 ¶ 42, quoted in the Court’s Opinion and Order, June 30, 2025

“The Court can neither identify the quoted language nor find any support for Watson’s position, nor even a discussion of Section 21(g) in this case.” — Court’s Opinion and Order, June 30, 2025 (regarding Watson’s citation of precedent that did not say what he claimed it said)

“Because any further amendment would be futile, Watson is denied leave to file any further counterclaims in this action.” — Court’s Opinion and Order, June 30, 2025

Who Else Pays When Insiders Win?

Economic Inequality: The Market Is Only “Free” If You Have the Information

The premise of a stock market is that buyers and sellers operate on the same information. Public companies publish filings, make announcements, and report earnings so that every investor, whether a hedge fund or a retiree with a brokerage account, starts from the same disclosed baseline. Insider trading destroys that premise. It does not just hand one person an unfair profit; it transfers that profit directly out of the pockets of the investors on the other side of the trade.

In this case, Giguiere’s $162,500 (roughly three years of grocery bills for an average American family) in alleged profits came from somewhere. It came from the investors who bought LTEA shares on December 21, 2017, believing a public announcement was new information when an insider had already acted on it. The ordinary investor who bought at $6.91 and held through the inevitable decline paid for the scheme with real dollars. They did not know the game had already been played before they sat down at the table.

This pattern concentrates wealth upward. The people with access to corporate insiders, private networks, and back-channel tips make money. The people who read the press release and believe it lose money. The system that is supposed to democratize investment instead becomes one more mechanism for transferring wealth from people without connections to people who have them.

Public Trust: When “Blockchain” Becomes a Weapon

The specific mechanism of this scheme deserves its own accounting. LTEA did not develop a blockchain product. It did not hire engineers, file patents, or build infrastructure. It changed its name and drafted a press release. The entire scheme was built on the assumption that the word “blockchain” alone would trigger a buying frenzy in late 2017’s crypto-mania environment, and that assumption was correct. The stock nearly tripled in a day on a name change.

Every scheme that exploits a public mania for legitimate technology corrupts the signal that technology sends to markets. When investors cannot tell whether a blockchain announcement is real innovation or a name-change pump, they discount all blockchain announcements. That discounting harms the legitimate companies that cannot raise capital because the space has been poisoned by manipulation. The damage to public trust in emerging technology markets is a direct economic cost, even if it never appears in a court filing.

The Case Isn’t Over. Here’s What to Watch.

The People Still in This Story

Watson filed his answer to the SEC’s complaint within 21 days of June 30, 2025, per the court’s order. The case against him for insider trading continues. He cannot countersue the SEC. He cannot relitigate the service question. The only path forward for him is trial.

Lindsay and Giguiere already settled. Their terms are sealed in consent judgments entered in September 2024 and December 2023 respectively. The source documents do not disclose the financial terms of those settlements.

The Watchlist: Who Should Be On This

• SEC Enforcement Division: Track the Watson case docket for trial scheduling, settlement announcements, and penalty filings.
• FINRA: The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority monitors broker-dealer conduct. Stock promoters like Giguiere operate in their jurisdiction.
• DOJ Securities Fraud Unit: Civil SEC enforcement can run parallel to criminal referrals. Watch for any DOJ activity connected to this scheme.
• SEC EDGAR (Long Blockchain Corp.): Track the company’s filings. It still exists under the new name and continues to file with regulators.
• State Securities Regulators: Individual states have independent securities fraud authority and can act independently of federal enforcement.

What You Can Actually Do

Retail investors get burned by schemes like this because they are isolated. The best protection is collective knowledge: follow independent financial journalist communities, support organizations that advocate for retail investor protections like Better Markets and Americans for Financial Reform, and report suspicious pump-and-dump activity directly to the SEC’s tips portal at sec.gov/tcr. The SEC does pay whistleblower awards. The system has tools. Use them.