Blockchain Law Group (BLG) which on the company webpage presents itself as "a leading group of legal practices with presence in multiple countries" was an escrow company for few Russia based ICOs.
As per statement of Gleb Markov, founder of Crypterium, this escrow served for "dozens of succesfull ICOs" including Crypterium and it is still operating.
"Our" escrow was an escrow for dozens of the largest ICOs worldwide. and it continues to operate under the same brand and with the same people headed - http://blockchainlawgroup.com. they moved to a new jurisdiction with a warmer climate :)
(https://translate.google.com)
Lets have a closer look now.
The Open Database Of The Corporate World returns two companies named Blockchain Law Group, one of them was registered in CA, USA. The other one was registered in Puerto Rico. Both companies were registered by Katrina Arden.
https://opencorporates.com/companies?q=BLOCKCHAIN+LAW+GROUP&utf8=%E2%9C%93
Company registered in CA, USA (11620 WILSHIRE BLVD, SUITE 900, LOS ANGELES CA 90025) was established on May 8, 2017, dissolved a year later on May 7, 2019 and is no more active.
https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_ca/C4023651
Company registered in Puerto Rico (165 Ponce de Leon Ave., Ste. 201, SAN JUAN, PR, 00917) was established on Jan 10, 2018, dissolved Feb 21, 2018 and is no more active, too.
https://opencorporates.com/companies/pr/403221-1511
There were four alleged attorneys in escrow company: Katrina Arden, Frank Grant, Irina Heaver and Alexey Miller.
https://steemit.com/blockchain/@saynotoscam/blockchain-law-group
Searching for officers returns one record for Katrina Arden and none for the three other attorneys:
https://opencorporates.com/officers?q=Katrina+Arden&utf8=%E2%9C%93 (inactive)
https://opencorporates.com/officers?q=Alexey+Miller&utf8=%E2%9C%93 (no records regarding BLG)
https://opencorporates.com/officers?q=Irina+Heaver&utf8=%E2%9C%93 (no record)
https://opencorporates.com/officers?q=Frank+Grant&utf8=%E2%9C%93 (no records regarding BLG)
We tried to ask Irina on Twitter (@IrinaHeaver) for a confirmation she was part of BLG with no result.
We can only guess where "the warmer climate" is...
BLG allegedly served for "dozens ICOs around the globe" however we could only find few of them (four, to be more precise, which raised $102,09M in total):
- Crypterium (raised $51M)
https://www.trackico.io/ico/crypterium/#market - Genexi (raised $20k)
https://www.trackico.io/ico/genexi/ - Connectius (raised $5.1M)
https://www.trackico.io/ico/connectius/ - INS Ecosystem (raised $45.95M) - now Insolar
https://icoholder.com/en/ins-ecosystem-ico
If you know any other ICOs BLG participated in as an escrow, please feel free to mention them in comments.
Genexi and Insolar are connected to Leonardo by Vinci, company which was co-founded by Mariya Lapuk. We will have a look at this company later, for now we can say this company and its founder Mariya is connected to IIDF (Internet Initiatives Development Fund) - branch of Skolkovo foundation which is connected to Workle (Vladimir Gorbunov, Crypterium) and PayQR (Gleb Markov, Crypterium).
https://leonardo.vc/
Founder of BLG, Katrina Arden, participated in few other ICOs as an advisor.
Coinlancer (raised $11.86M)
https://www.trackico.io/ico/coinlancer/#marketKYC.Legal (raised $22.5M)
https://www.trackico.io/ico/kyclegal/S3ntigrapH
Bitcoin Coral
CERO COIN
Katrina was involved in another fake company called Launch My ICO, which interacted with few projects: Coinlancer, Vanig, Femergy and Virtual Arena.
http://www.launchmyico.com/
- Vanig (raised $1.65M)
https://en.coinjinja.com/ico/vanig
One of the Vanig ICO advisor was Paddy Tan, professional shiller, remember this name, we will have a look at this name and his connections to other suspicious ICOs (Cryptoindex, Storiqa, Boomstarter.Network, etc) in another article later.
- Femergy
https://www.ratingtoken.net/ico/MOM-1 - Virtual Arena
https://virtualarena.io/
Here we can see that Genexi ICO claimed BLG was their escrow company even after both BLGs were dissolved:
Now, who is Katrina Arden?
Katrina is founder of Blockchain Law group however her name is not even shown on BLG webpage.
As per her LinkedIn profile she is "an experienced attorney licensed in California and Puerto Rico as well as in the Russian Federation. For over 10 years, Ms. Arden worked with companies and individual clients providing various legal services in connection with the U.S. Federal Law. Attorney Katrina Arden is an author of multiple legal articles and a frequent guest at the conferences. In addition to her legal education, Ms. Arden has a Masters degree in Financial Management, which provides her with the ability to understand complex business matters."
https://www.linkedin.com/in/katrina-arden-70260426/
Note that her LinkedIn profile has not a single mention regarding blockchain and BLG.
As per Crunchbase profile she "is a blockchain attorney licensed in the State of California, the United States, and in the Russian Federation... She is involved in the blockchain community since 2016 and consulted on multiple token sale projects (Cryptonomos, Giga Watt project, ICOBox, and others)... Katrina Arden is a frequent guest at the blockchain and ICO conferences; she gave interviews and provided comments on the ICO matters to various media and has been in discussions with the regulators of multiple countries on development and implementation of the blockchain and cryptocurrency law.
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/katrina-arden
Let´s Google do some work now.
We can see that Katrina works as an attorney for two companies, Valant LLP and Aliant.
http://www.valantlaw.com/attorneys/view/katrina-arden (practise areas blockchain law and business law)
https://www.aliantlaw.com/attorneys/view/katrina-arden (practise areas blockchain law and business law)
However when we click on her blockchain law links, they are both inactive (page not found).
Katrina´s license:
http://members.calbar.ca.gov/fal/Licensee/Detail/265615
https://www.allcaliforniaattorneys.com/attorney/265615/ekaterina-y-kovaleva
Note that second link gives us phone number (310) 933-4455 which is a number of LA immigration center (https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&rlz=1C1GCEU_skSK821CZ821&ei=NJnHXMLFB4nHwALMlLCoCw&q=310+933-4455&oq=310+933-4455&gs_l=psy-ab.3...172674.174326..175111...0.0..0.67.132.2......0....1..gws-wiz.6DUoN2TdA6o) and an email address katrina@keylawoffice.com. Domain keylawoffice.com takes us to Divorce and Family Law Attorneys in Hays County, Texas (https://www.keylawoffice.com).
Katrina´s maiden name was Ekaterina Kovaleva (the person who registered webpage for fake escrow company).
http://echonewsweek.com/adv/?details=38
https://losangeles.zagranitsa.com/blogger/5304
We can see that her main qualification is immigration law as well as bankruptcy, credit history and taxes. There is very little evidence (better say none evidence) she was ever involved in blockchain apart the period when BLG was live (1 year) and served as an alleged escrow and few paid articles (like this, written by Nick Evdokimov, founder of ICOBox: https://betanews.com/2017/09/15/ico-regulatory-issues).
What we can say is that Katrina just generally took a risk and attended few blockchain conferences during the ICOs she was involved in to pretend that BLG is a legit escrow company and helped to make these ICOs seem legit, too.