After shutting down PlexCorps in December for alleged securities fraud in relation to the PlexCoin Initial Coin Offering (ICO), the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) submitted a letter to the court this week seeking sanctions and a default judgment against PlexCorps' founders for ignoring court orders concerning accounting and repatriation of digital assets and evidence discovery. The SEC is currently seeking these actions in order to prevent further dissipation of investors' assets because it believes a large portion of the funds raised in the ICO are still being held in cryptocurrency wallets controlled by the PlexCorps founders. According to the SEC, the founders have "blatantly and without any justification disregarded the Court's multiple equivocal orders" and the SEC does not believe that the founders intend to follow court instructions.

In a report this week on cyberthreats for the second quarter of 2018, one of the leading device-to-cloud cybersecurity companies reported a surge in cryptomining malware. The numbers it reports are staggering; after increasing in the fourth quarter of 2017, new cryptomining malware samples increased 629 percent to more than 2.9 million in the first quarter of 2018, and then by another 2.5 million new samples in the second quarter of 2018. The report specifically identifies threats around older malware being retooled with mining capabilities and malware targeting devices other than personal computers.

This week, the Diar, a cryptocurrency research publication, reported that U.S. government agencies have entered into contracts and purchase orders valued at $5.7 million with blockchain analysis companies, triple the amount in 2017. The Internal Revenue Service reportedly accounts for 38 percent of this spending with nine contracts, followed next by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement with nine contracts, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation with 12 contracts. Together, the Diar reports, the three agencies account for 85 percent of the total spending. The Diar also reported this week that ICOs have doubled the amount raised to date in 2018 compared to 2017, but the popularity of ICOs has fallen. Not accounting for the top 100 cryptocurrencies, 70 percent of tokens have seen their value fall below the token value at the time of the ICO. The Diar also reported that of the tokens that completed an ICO in 2017-2018, over one-third of those tokens, having raised more than $2.3 billion, have not yet listed their tokens on any exchange.

Last week, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) announced that it will be increasing its scrutiny of ICOs due to persistent problems associated with the offerings, including the use of "misleading or deceptive" statements in sales and marketing materials and offerors not holding Australian financial services licenses. The ASIC is reportedly concerned that these misleading ICOs could impact investor confidence. Since April, the ASIC reports that it has stopped five ICOs and is currently taking regulatory action against a completed ICO. Of the ICOs that were halted, the ASIC shared that some are being restructured so as to carry out the offering within the confines of the law.

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