Bankera founders blew ICO funds on luxury real estate, report
The founders of now-collapsed Lithuanian crypto project Bankera (BNK) used funds from its much-hyped initial coin offering (ICO) to buy up luxury real estate, including a villa on the French Riviera and high-end property in Lithuania, leaving unlucky investors a collective €100 million ($113.7 million) out of pocket. This is according to a joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Lithuanian outlet 15min. Bankera’s founders Vytautas Karalevičius, Justas Dobiliauskas, and Mantas Mockevičius raised the funds from more than 100,000 investors during the 2017 ICO, promising to create “a bank for the blockchain era.” However, according to the OCCRP, instead of building the promised blockchain-powered bank, the founders appear to have funneled millions into an extensive real estate portfolio via a web of companies and a privately owned Pacific island bank . The ICO proceeds, originally meant to develop cryptocurrency infrastr...