Centra Tech ICO founders planned to fake CEO death
Everybody in the crypto community already knows about the fraudulent nature of Centra Tech - a relatively big ICO project the token of which has even been listed on major exchanges. Now three founders behind this offering - Robert Farkas, Sohrab “Sam” Sharma and Raymond Trapani are officially indicted by the United States authorities, namely the Department of Justice.
Older reports contained extracts from the messages they have sent each other and now the public gets to see new additional batch: looks like that at some point in July 2017, Sharma discussed the possibility of staging the death of the person that never existed, but was presented as a CEO of the company. Another fictitious executive would have been the wife of “Michael Edwards”. The fake news on the car accident were never disseminated.
Other tactics have been used, including celebrity promotion. Famous boxer Floyd Mayweather has posted several tweets in support of Centra and right now, he is likely regretting this decision.
Notably, old NYT reports from 2017 contain links to the Instagram account of Raymond Trapani who previously worked as a credit repair specialist, never having any experience in coding or blockchain technologies before establishing Centra. This is actually one of the best red flags of an unreliable ICO: when the key members have no experience, the project has more chances to fall even if it’s not fraudulent.