Cryptocurrency businessman and influencer Richard Heart scammed investors and spent millions of dollars buying luxury goods, sports cars, watches, and a 555-carat black diamond known as The Enigma, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which charged Mr Heart with fraud on Monday.
The crypto personality, who has a large following on YouTube and social media, where he doles out business tips in between unboxing videos of Rolex watches, spent years making inflated claims to investors, according to the SEC.
In one 2022 social media post, Mr Heart posed standing next to a Lamborghini sports car holding a Gucci bag, claiming the photo showed “a million dollars” worth of luxury goods.
“Heart called on investors to buy crypto asset securities in offerings that he failed to register. He then defrauded those investors by spending some of their crypto assets on exorbitant luxury goods,” Eric Werner, Director of the SEC’s Fort Worth Regional Office, said in a statement on Monday. “This action seeks to protect the investing public and hold Heart accountable for his actions.”
The Independent has contacted Mr Heart for comment.
In 2018, Mr Heart began marketing a product called Hex, claiming it was the world’s first high-yield “blockchain certificate of deposit.” A year later, he reported the sale of 2.3m Ethereum worth of Hex, worth a dollar value of $678m, when in reality he and a group of investors had made these purchases of Hex themselves, in order to give a false appearance of demand, according to the SEC.
Between 2021 and 2022, Mr Heart made two more unregistered crypto offerings related to an alleged crypto asset network, PulseChain, and an alleged crypto trading platform, PulseX, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.
In addition to allegedly buying $2m worth of Rolex watches, Mr Heart also bought The Enigma, an ultra-rare carbonado black diamond.
The gem, which weighs in at 555.55 carats, is the largest of its kind in the world, and the largest cut diamond in the world, according to the Sotheby’s auction house.
The diamond sold for $4.3m in 2022.
The rare type of stone can only be found in alluvial deposits in Brazil and Central African Republic.
