Tron founder Justin Sun receives a summons from New York Southern District Court

Tron founder, Justin Sun, has received a summons from the Southern District Court of New York. Notably, Sun is also the head of the BitTorrent Foundation, whose alleged securities violations provoked an enforcement action in March from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

From the report, the summons went to two addresses in Singapore, giving Sun up to three weeks (21 days) to respond. Failure to respond in time would result in the court ruling in favor of the plaintiff, the SEC. The two locations include a Good Class Bungalow in the Tanglin area on 8 Lady Hill Road and Suntec Tower Two, an office space at 9 Temasek Boulevard.

Justin Sun faces multiple charges

In a lawsuit filed on March 23 against Justin Sun and three organizations – Tron Foundation Limited, BitTorrent Foundation, and Rainberry Inc.– the SEC brought several charges against the Tron founder.

First, Sun is accused of trading Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) without registering them as securities. He is also charged with failure to disclose payments made to celebrities such as Akon, Lil Yachty, Ne-Yo, Kendra Lust, Lindsay Lohan and Austin Malone, among others like Jake Paul, who endorsed crypto assets and other products related to Sun’s organization.

Further, the regulator accuses the crypto billionaire of wash trading, a form of pump-and-dump scheme where one purchases and sells a security in a single transaction or two of closely related transactions. In so doing, the trader makes it appear that much trading is taking place despite no change in beneficial ownership.

He manipulated the market for TRX to create the artificial appearance of legitimate investor interest and keep (its) price afloat.

Hundreds of thousands of trades were said to have been carried out between accounts he controlled. An excerpt from the March 23 announcement about the enforcement action reads:

From at least April 2018 through February 2019, Sun allegedly directed his employees to engage in more than 600,000 wash trades of TRX between two crypto asset trading accounts he controlled, with between 4.5 million and 7.4 million TRX wash traded daily.

The lawsuit also alleged that Sun used renowned personalities as endorsers, noting, “Sun further induced investors to purchase TRX and BTT by orchestrating a promotional campaign in which he and his celebrity promoters hid the fact that the celebrities were paid for their tweets.”

Justin Sun remains untroubled

Despite the stark enforcement actions by the SEC, Tron’s Justin Sun remains untroubled, sounding a relaxed message on social media. Citing an April 11 tweet, the billionaire posted a video of a Hong Kong crypto industry social event with a caption to show how hosting such a “remarkable event” in Hong Kong meant a lot to him.

Our ultimate goal is to host cryptocurrency events in Beijing and Shanghai. I am confident that we will be able to achieve it in a few years.

Notably, there was no record or instance of Sun acknowledging that crypto sales and trading are illegal across China.

The story is still developing as Sun has again dismissed the news as FUD.

TRX/USDT 1-day chart

The Tron blockchain native token TRX seems unaffected by the news so far. At the time of writing, Tron token price is $0.065, up 0.5% in the last 24 hours but down 0.1% in the last hour.