Former Celsius director exposes alleged price manipulation of CEL token
Talk to CNBCFormer Celsius director said the company is actively involved in price-fixing CEL tokens.
Timothy Cradle I worked for the company for over 2 years. He started as an AML analyst, then moved to oversight and took a leading role as director of financial crime compliance. He stayed in that position for three months.
Celsius – Lessons on how to not run a lending platform
Celsius announced a withdrawal, swap, and transfer suspension on June 13th to “stabilize” its operations.
In the weeks leading up to the outage, users reported difficulty in withdrawing funds, fueling rumors that the company went bankrupt. At the time, CEO Alex Mashinsky denied his allegations against an unnamed entity trying to overthrow the company and denounced criticism, especially CEL’s sluggish performance.
Since then, it has become clear that Celsius has been actively involved in high-risk, high-leverage transactions. However, the strategy was revoked as the cryptocurrency winter began to bite hard.
The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 14, ending speculation that normal operations would resume. Submission to the court $ 1.2 billion Insufficient Balance Sheet — Asks questions about whether the user’s funds will be returned.
CEL operation
Cradle said he was the first to catch the wind of market manipulation at the 2019 Christmas party. At the event, a former compliance director said he heard senior executives discussing “intentional price fluctuations” at CEL.
In 2020, the price of CEL began to rise. However, it wasn’t until September 2020 that it became parabolic and reached a record $ 8.05 on June 4, 2021. Since then, CEL has fallen steadily, forming a local bottom at $ 0.28 on June 14.
Market manipulation is an attempt to interfere with the free and fair operation of the market.According to crypto entrepreneurs Eric reed, There are laws against market manipulation. However, nothing is unique to cryptocurrencies.
Cradle shared insider insights and said Celsius’ management is “absolutely” using customer funds to drive CEL prices high.
“I don’t know a better way to express that. But they were on the market, actively trading and raising the price of tokens.”
Cradle said in support of this claim that corporate culture pays little attention to compliance, lacks compliance team staff, limited resources, and is rejected as a “dangerous investment.” ..
