A US court has served a subpoena on the Singapore address of Tron founder Justin Sun in connection with a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) civil case.
On April 12, the Southern District Court of New York ordered Sun to respond to the subpoena within 21 days by contacting SEC attorney Adam Gottlieb. According to the court, “judgment by default will be entered” if the Tron founder does not respond, suggesting penalties related to alleged securities law violations.
Sun’s Twitter bio indicated that he was in Switzerland, while the reactivity of his social media accounts suggested who had recently been to Hong Kong. The Tron co-founder was reportedly born in China and claims citizenship in Grenada, while the Tron Foundation was established in Singapore in 2017.
arrived HK pic.twitter.com/8PgKsCrDeQ
— HE Justin Sun 孙宇晨 (@justinsuntron) April 11, 2023
In March, the SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Sun, the Tron Foundation, the BitTorrent Foundation, and Rainberry for “orchestrating the unregistered offer and sale, manipulative trading, and unlawful promotion” of Tron (TRX) as a crypto security. The financial regulator alleged that Sun engaged in “manipulative laundering operations” helping to boost public interest in TRX and BitTorrent (BTT) with the help of celebrities such as Soulja Boy, Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul and Akon.
At the time of the SEC’s announcement, all of the celebrities allegedly involved in the scheme had settled with the regulator, except for Austin Mahone and Soulja Boy. The SEC said it planned to “permanently bar” Sun from acting as an officer or director of any company that offers cryptocurrency should it prevail in the case.
Sun is by no means the only figure in the cryptocurrency industry to have been in the crosshairs of US authorities following the 2022 market crash and multiple bankruptcies. In January, a bankruptcy judge issued a summons to Three Arrow Capital co-founder Kyle Davies. Unlike the Sun subpoena, which was sent to a physical address, the US court authorized a subpoena via Twitter in Davies’s case, but Davies had not responded at the time of publication.
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