The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) of the USA has announced a penalty of 130 million dollars for the Brazilian founders of EmpiresX. Emerson Pires, Flavio Goncalves, and Joshua Nicholas, have been accused of running a crypto fraud, promising unreal returns on investments.
EmpiresX: the CFTC sanctions the founders for 130 million dollars for crypto fraud
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) of the USA announced that the founders of EmpiresX have been fined 130 million dollars.
Specifically, Judge Cecilia Altonaga of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida issued the verdict both financial and legal, against the founders Emerson Pires and Flavio Goncalves and the associate Joshua Nicholas.
In practice, it seems that the three individuals allegedly managed a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme, deceiving investors by promising them a return on their investments that never occurred.
EmpiresX has been defined by the CFTC as an illegal cryptocurrency investment platform.
The case was originally filed on June 30, 2022, and concluded with a default judgment, as the defendants did not respond to the charges by the deadline.
EmpiresX and the crypto fraud
According to what is reported, the CFTC order against the founders of EmpireX requires that Pires and Goncalves pay, jointly, more than 32 million dollars in relief and more than 96 million dollars in civil monetary penalties.
The partner Nicholas will have to pay 289,000 dollars in compensation and 867,000 dollars in civil monetary penalties.
Not only that, in addition to the sanction, the CFTC has permanently prohibited the three subjects from engaging in behaviors that violate the CEA, and from registering with the CFTC and operating in any market regulated by the CFTC.
EmpiresX was therefore the platform where the three individuals allegedly fraudulently solicited individuals to trade futures and options on commodities and other products. Since 2020, Pires and Goncalves and the company Empires Consulting allegedly raised at least 41.6 million dollars from over 12,500 individuals.
Not only that, the crypto fraud involved a series of false statements made by the three defendants about the use of the participants’ funds in the pools, which concerned both the size of the pools and the returns for the participants. EmpiresX then saw in November 2021 the suspension of participants’ withdrawals.
The boom of crypto scams around the TRUMP token
While the case of EmpiresX dates back to 2022, in this 2025 that has just begun, there has already been talk of a crypto scam involving Donald Trump’s memecoin, TRUMP.
In fact, taking advantage of the hype of that moment, it seems that the number of malicious tokens and dApps that would have used the name TRUMP to deceive users has exploded.
Two weeks ago, it was reported that only over the weekend the name “Trump” contained in harmful coins had increased by 206%. In practice, it went from a daily average of 3,330 units to 6,800 fraudulent scam tokens on the day of the inauguration.
Even in terms of decentralized applications, the situation has become embarrassing. In fact, the day following the launch of the TRUMP memecoin, as many as 91 new impersonator dApps were launched, with a 14-fold increase over the previous daily average.