The company behind the popular crypto series “Stoner Cats,” with celebrities like Mila Kunis, was sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. (SEK). The crypto regulator believes Stoner Cats 2 LLC (SC2) is an unregistered sale of cryptoEffects‘ has carried out. The company was forced to cancel the series and pay a $1 million fine.
Crypto series charged by US regulator
The series is about some old lady’s cats who start consuming cannabis. The cats were voiced by big names like Mila Kunis, Seth MacFarlane (from Family Guy), and Vitalik Buterin, the founder of ether (ETH). Chris Rock, who was punched in the face by Will Smith last year, also made a character appearance in the series.
To get the show going there was… Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) sold from the show. In total, more than ten thousand units were sold for around $800 each. Anyone who purchased an NFT was given the power to watch the show. The SEC, on the other hand, seemed to be the one Community effort not to appreciate and decided to issue a cease and desist order to the company behind the series.
Today we charged Stoner Cats 2 LLC with conducting an unregistered offering of crypto asset securities in the form of purportedly non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that raised approximately $8 million from investors to create an animated web series called to finance Stoner Cats.
— US Securities and Exchange Commission (@SECGov) September 13, 2023
The reason for this was the lack of registration of the sale of NFTs. The SEC believes the sale was a “securities.” According to the SEC, the NFTs were sold with an expectation of profit, citing a popular cast as a reason for increases in value. For this reason, the sale had to be registered with the supervisory authority, which was not the case.
For the second time, the SEC is suing the NFT seller
SC2 canceled the series and will pay a $1 million fine. A fund will be set up to compensate affected investors. The company has neither admitted nor denied that they were wrong. This is the second time the SEC has filed charges over the unregistered sale of NFTs. Reports were filed more frequently due to the unregistered sale of crypto.
This happened, for example, in June with the crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase. The largest and second largest on the market They were accused of offering securities. This led to a sharp decline in the crypto market. Ripple, the company behind the XRP coin, recently won a similar lawsuit. The dispute had been going on since December 2020, but it was (partially) ended recently.
