Ripple, Ripple CEO Served Third Securities Fraud Lawsuit

Three and counting: Ripple, the cryptocurrency startup behind the XRP tokens, has reportedly been hit with a third lawsuit alleging securities fraud.

“A private XRP investor alleges that Ripple Labs Inc. and its CEO Bradley Garlinghouse have conflated their token with its proprietary Ripple technology and even illegally profited from price increases the whole time,” a summary of the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit essentially centers around allegations that Ripple created billions of XRP tokens out of thin air and profited by selling them and pushing them to the public in what amounts to a never-ending coin offering.

“The nature of the XRP’s centralized and mining-free distribution model, all three lawsuits allege, has allowed for a continuous ICO period, in which Ripple Labs Inc. have been funding themselves by selling close to $100 million worth of their own cryptocurrency — and that’s just in the last quarter of 2017,” a report said.

Ripple had no immediate response to the latest suit but, in response to the last suit in May, a spokesman for the company said “like any civil proceeding, we’ll assess the merit or lack of merit to the allegations at the appropriate time; whether or not XRP is a security is for the SEC to decide. We continue to believe XRP should not be classified as a security.”