Cere Network co-founder and board face $100 million lawsuit over alleged token issuance fraud

BlockBeats News, January 29, decentralized data cloud platform Cere Network is once again embroiled in legal disputes. According to the latest complaint filed with the San Francisco federal court, Cere co-founder Fred Jin, along with his family and board members, are accused of carrying out a "pump-and-dump" scheme during the 2021 token public offering, illegally embezzling investor funds, with the claimed damages reaching as high as 100 million US dollars.

The plaintiff, Vivian Liu, claims to be both a Cere employee and an investor. The complaint alleges that Jin had promised that tokens belonging to himself and early investors would only be unlocked several months after listing, but in reality, Jin and his associates secretly sold over 41 million US dollars worth of CERE tokens on multiple trading platforms immediately after the token went live, transferring the funds into personal wallets.

This is the second lawsuit Cere Network has faced this month. Previously, on January 13, another co-founder, Kenzi Wang, filed a lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery on behalf of the company against Jin and the board, accusing them of systematically misappropriating over 58 million US dollars of company assets and covering up their actions through fraudulent accounting, shell entities, and wash trading.

The latest lawsuit also alleges that Jin had collaborated with market maker Gotbit, who has been convicted of market manipulation, using bots to inflate trading volumes to conceal fraudulent activities. Currently, the price of CERE tokens has dropped by about 99.9% from its peak in November 2021. Cere Network and Fred Jin have not yet responded to the related allegations.