The Heat’s Jimmy Butler and a YouTube influencer have agreed to pay $340,000 to resolve their disagreements over cryptocurrency.
Jimmy Butler, a player for the Miami Heat, and Ben Armstrong, a YouTube influencer, have agreed to pay $340,000 to resolve a case in which it was claimed they assisted in tricking investors into purchasing unregistered assets from Binance Holdings Limited, the company running the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. As part of the deal, Armstrong and Butler admitted no wrongdoing, according to court documents.
The deal was filed in federal court in Miami on Monday, and U.S. District Judge Roy Altman will now choose whether to grant preliminary approval. After months of negotiations, the agreement was struck with the help of mediator Michael Hanzman, a retired Miami-Dade Circuit Judge. Following a final hearing where buyers of Binance’s unregistered securities will have a chance to comment on the settlement, Altman will then consider approving it.
The case was brought against Butler, Armstrong (also known as BitBoy Crypto), Binance, and co-founder Changpeng Zhao last year. According to the lawsuit, they tricked investors into purchasing tokens and cryptocurrencies, such as Binance’s own BNB token, even though they were illegally unregistered securities.
In a $4 million settlement with the Justice Department last year, Binance Holdings Limited and Zhao admitted to violating anti-money laundering laws and U.S. sanctions, allowing Binance.com, a cryptocurrency exchange, to stay operational. AVENTURA ADMITS GUILTY TO WIRE DECEPTION Austin Michael Taylor, the owner of CLU LLC, an Aventura-based corporation, and the creator of the cryptocurrency project CluCoin, entered a guilty plea to wire fraud in a Miami federal court earlier this month.
Taylor, 40, will be sentenced on October 31 and could spend up to 20 years behind bars. He was charged with exploiting his substantial social media following to spark interest in a digital token he was going by the name “CLU,” while simultaneously moving $1,140,000 in funds belonging to CluCoin investors to his own account.
According to the prosecution, Taylor advertised CLU’s ICO at a fundraiser where participants traded their existing cryptocurrency holdings for a brand-new digital token. They said that in an effort to draw investors, Taylor wrote a white paper outlining the philanthropic goals of the initial coin offering.
Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami and the Justice Department in Washington state that Taylor founded CluCoin in 2021 and later directed it towards different endeavours, such as non-fungible tokens, a video game, and a metaverse platform.