As many of you know I have become a fairly active member of the Bitshares community and it’s been pretty hard to avoid this ongoing war between sides, those who believe in Arise and those who don’t. So I thought I’d do a little digging because to be quite honest I don’t believe anything the media tries to portray as truth, nor do I have faith in governments or their rogue agencies. This complete lack of faith in large controlling institutions was one of the main reasons I got involved in crypto and the decentralization movement.
So how did this whole fiasco get started? Well after some digging it seems to me there are an abundance of scam articles all over the net, re-tweeted, re-posted, liked, shared and commented on by accounts with barely any followers and some without even a profile picture. You can see these everywhere. I think its fair to presume something isn’t quite right here.
This bombardment of social media with these posts gave the SEC just the excuse they needed to flex their muscles, which they did. They came heavily armed and in numbers to raid a load of computer geeks whilst they slept early in the morning… Make your own judgement there. They then proceeded to tweet about the AriseBank “Scam” although nothing has been proved in court. Is this really how government agencies should go about their business?
After calling Arisebank a “Scam” they then file a complaint against them. In the complaint they call AriseBank a security, this is the main focus of the complaint. They are not happy that Arise didn’t register the “Security” as shown in the picture below (Page 2, section 4). So is it a scam or a security? Even the SEC don’t seem to know but they will publicly slander the team anyway and use force to seize their assets.
One of the main reasons and most popular themes I found was the accusations that no banks exist and Arise was trying to defraud investors with this lie. Well guess what… After a little digging I found these documents…
This first document is a copy of the offer of acquisition with regards to the banks that apparently don’t exist!
This second document is a notification of receipt of deposit paid and therefore proof of intent to buy the banks that apparently don’t exist…
Here’s where the SEC accuse AriseBank of their supposed fraud:
Jared Rice released a correction and admitted he was so excited he got carried away and made an announcement regarding the purchase of the banks, even though the deal had not yet been finalized. You can read the correction here:
AriseBank™ Announces Correction on Recent Company News Citing FDIC Status and Acquisitions
In my eyes, Jared Rice and the AriseBank team have done absolutely nothing fraudulent. It’s safe to say they have made a fair few errors and miscalculations on how to go about their business but there’s nothing illegal about that.
Further down the SEC complaint document we see this:
So let’s get this straight, “AriseBank has developed an algorthmic trading application” that requires AriseCoin in order to be used. Sounds like a utility to me? So in one document, the SEC have called arise a “Scam”, a “security” and now it appears they have just defined it as a utility. If they can’t even define what it is they appear to have such a problem with how on earth do they expect to win in court?
I’m gonna be leaving it at that for now, but but believe me, I’m still digging. Seems to me the only criminals are yet another over reaching, rogue, american government agency. Stay tuned, I’ll be back with more.
Here’s the link to the complaint filled against AriseBank, Jared Rice & Stanley Ford: https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2018/comp-pr2018-8.pd