SEC wins lawsuit against Rivetz Corp and its CEO over over $18 million in unregistered securities sales

The U.S. SEC has won its ICO-related case against Rivetz Corp and its CEO Steven Sprague. In a Sept. 30 order, Massachusetts federal court judge Mark Mastroianni agreed with the SEC that Sprague’s offering of Ethereum-based Rivetz (RvT) tokens to Americans through Rivetz constituted an unregistered sale of securities. The SEC sued the defunct blockchain hardware company and Sprague in September 2021, alleging that they sold $18 million worth of Rivetz tokens in 2017 to more than 7,200 investors, a third of whom were in the U.S. Neither the SEC nor Sprague disputed material facts in the case, but Sprague (representing himself) claimed that the token was a software product, not an investment contract under the SEC’s definition of a security, the Howey test. But the judge wrote, “From the time the ICO was first announced until its completion, Rivetz and Sprague made statements to potential purchasers that explicitly tied the value of the RvT tokens to Rivetz’s goal of creating a secure ecosystem for mobile devices.” (Cointelegraph)