After the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against Richard Shueler, the founder of Hex (HEX), and after failing to serve him in person, the regulator stated it had served him through an alternative method used when it cannot locate the defendant.
Indeed, it seems that Shueler, also known as Richard Heart, has been successfully dodging the authorities’ reach since at least August 22, 2023, when they could not find him the first time, according to the SEC’s status report filed to the court on November 21, so the agency was not able to serve him.
Failed attempts to serve Shueler
Furthermore, the process server started trying to serve Shueler through calls, texts, letters, and in-person at his residence in Helsinki, Finland, around September 13, and all of these attempts failed, although his online presence hasn’t suffered, and he made more than 40 X posts relating to the crypto sector since the report.
However, the SEC’s court filing from December 11 reads that the agency managed to serve him, albeit through a substitute service, on October 31, “in accordance with Finnish law and the Hague Convention on the Service Abroad of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents.”
Why SEC is suing Hex founder
As a reminder, the SEC is suing Shueler, the creator of the first blockchain certificate of deposit, over the alleged illegal sales of “crypto asset securities” Hex, PulseChain (PLS), and PulseX (PSLX), as well as committing “fraud for misappropriating at least $12 million” of investors’ funds.
According to the SEC’s press release from July 31, Shueler started marketing Hex in 2018 as an “investment designed to make people ‘rich,’” after which “Heart and Hex allegedly offered and sold Hex tokens in an unregistered offering, collecting more than 2.3 million Ethereum (ETH)” between December 2019 through November 2020.
On top of that:
“The complaint also alleges that, between at least July 2021 and March 2022, Heart orchestrated two additional unregistered crypto asset security offerings that each raised hundreds of millions of dollars more in crypto assets (…) intended to support the development of a supposed crypto asset network, PulseChain, and a claimed crypto asset trading platform, PulseX.”
Meanwhile, the price of the HEX token at press time stood at $0.004775, recording a decline of 6.02% in the last 24 hours, in addition to losing 3.49% across the previous seven days, dropping 30.14% in the past month and as much as 82.18% on its yearly chart, possibly under the effect of the SEC lawsuit.
