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Feds, SEC charge app maker with fraud, saying ‘AI’ service was Philippine workers
US authorities have charged a tech app founder with fraud, alleging that his advertised artificial intelligence-powered e-commerce app actually relied on human workers in the Philippines.
Albert Saniger of Barcelona, Spain, founder and former CEO of the company Nate, was charged with one count of securities fraud and wire fraud, the Justice Department said in an April 9 statement, while the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a parallel civil action.
Court documents said Saniger founded Nate around 2018 and launched an app of the same name in July 2020, marketing it as an AI-powered universal shopping cart that offered users the ability to complete online retail transactions, including filling in shipping details and sizing, without human input.
The Justice Department alleged that, in reality, “Saniger used hundreds of contractors, or ‘purchasing assistants,’ in a call center located in the Philippines to manually complete purchases occurring over the nate app.”
Investors gave Saniger over $40 million, feds say
Acting US Attorney for New York Matthew Podolsky alleged Saniger duped investors by “exploiting the promise and allure of AI technology to build a false narrative about innovation that never existed.”
Under the guise of investing in the AI-powered app, Sangier allegedly solicited more than $40 million in investments from venture capital firms and told employees to hide the true source of Nate’s automation.
“This type of deception not only victimizes innocent investors, it diverts capital from legitimate startups, makes investors skeptical of real breakthroughs, and ultimately impedes the progress of AI development,” Podolsky said.
The company acquired AI technology from a third party and had a team of data scientists develop it, but authorities claimed the app never achieved the ability to consistently complete e-commerce purchases, and its actual automation rate was effectively zero.
Related: Aussie regulator to shut 95 ‘hydra’ firms linked to crypto, romance scams
During a busy holiday season in 2021, it’s alleged that Sanger directed Nate’s engineering team to develop bots to automate some transactions on the app along with the human workers.
Nate ceased operations in January 2023, and Saniger terminated all of Nate’s employees after media reports started casting doubt on the app’s capabilities, according to the SEC’s court filing.
The securities and wire fraud charges each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years behind bars. The SEC suit is asking the courts to ban Saniger from holding office in any similar company and return investor funds.
Cointelegraph contacted Nate for comment. Information on Saniger’s lawyers was not immediately available.
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Onchain sleuth ZachXBT has flagged a suspicious transfer involving 3,520 Bitcoin (BTC) (valued at $330.7 million) that may indicate a major theft. The transaction, reported on April 28, saw funds moved from a potential victim’s wallet to the address bc1qcry…vz55g. Following the transfer, the stolen stash was quickly laundered through over six instant exchanges and swapped into privacy-focused cryptocurrency Monero (XMR). The large-scale conversion led to a sharp 50% spike in XMR’s price, with the token reaching an intraday high of $339, according to data from CoinMarketCap. At the time of writing, XMR has settled slightly but remains up 25% in the past 24 hours, trading at $289. When asked whether North Korea’s Lazarus Group was behind the attack, ZachXBT dismissed the theory, stating it was “highly probable it’s not,” suggesting independent hackers were responsible. Related: Kraken to end Monero support in European Economic Area In a recent comment to Cointelegraph, Chainalysis noted that most criminal transactions still rely on mainstream cryptocurrencies. “While there are concerns of more criminals moving to privacy coins for anonymity, the vast majority of criminal activity still uses mainstream cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and stablecoins,” Chainalysis said. The firm added that these assets remain attractive because they offer the same benefits to bad actors as they do to legitimate users — cross-border functionality, instant settlement, and high liquidity. Chainalysis noted that privacy coins pose limitations for criminals due to reduced liquidity and the fact that many major exchanges have delisted assets like Monero. “Cryptocurrency is only useful if you can buy and sell goods and services or cash out into fiat, and that is much more difficult with privacy coins, especially as many mainstream exchanges have offboarded the use of privacy coins, such as Monero,” they explained. The firm even said that blockchain transparency allows law enforcement to trace and recover illicit funds, regardless of the cryptocurrency used. In 2024, a leaked Chainalysis video suggested that Monero transactions could be traceable despite the privacy-preserving nature of the blockchain. The video reportedly showed how Chainalysis could track transactions back to 2021 via its own “malicious” Monero nodes. Related: The IRS offers a $625,000 bounty to anyone who can break Monero and Lightning Network The suspected laundering operation comes as Monero is gaining wider retail acceptance. Two Spar supermarket locations in Switzerland recently began accepting XMR for payments. The announcement, shared by Monero’s official X account, credits partnerships with DFX Swiss and OpenCryptoPay for enabling the integration. One user, posting on April 25, shared their experience of purchasing organic cacao using XMR at a Spar store in Kreuzlingen. In April 2025, Spar first tapped into the crypto market by introducing Bitcoin payments through the Lightning Network at outlets in Zug, Switzerland. Magazine: Bitcoin $100K hopes on ice, SBF’s mysterious prison move: Hodler’s Digest, April 20 – 26 Nike has been hit with a class-action lawsuit that accuses the sportswear giant of operating a rug pull for shuttering its non-fungible token (NFT) platform RTFKT in January. A group of RTFKT users led by Jagdeep Cheema claimed in the proposed class suit filed in a Brooklyn federal court on April 25 that they suffered “significant damages” as a result of Nike touting its sneaker-themed NFTs to gain investors, then shuttering the platform. The suit claimed the NFTs were unregistered securities, as Nike sold them without registering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It accused the company of using “its iconic brand and marketing prowess to hype, promote, and prop up the unregistered securities that RTFKT sold.” “Because the Nike NFTs derived their value from the success of a given promoter and project — here, Nike and its marketing efforts — investors purchased this digital asset with the hope that its value would increase in the future as the project grows in popularity based on the Nike brand,” the lawsuit argued. The lawsuit asks for $5 million in damages, claiming Nike broke consumer protection laws and violated various state unfair trade and competition laws. A US court hasn’t definitively ruled on whether NFTs are securities. Still, in an April 9 letter to the SEC, marketplace OpenSea urged the regulator to exclude NFTs from federal securities laws, arguing they don’t meet the legal definition of a security. In its case against Nike, the class group said that the court doesn’t necessarily need to rule on the legal status of NFTs to address the complaint. In 2021, Nike acquired the NFT firm RTFKT Studios, which created virtual sneakers. According to the complaint, holders of the resulting Nike NFTs were told the tokens could be traded peer-to-peer on the secondary market and used to complete challenges and quests that could lead to rewards. Nike’s crypto kick NFT collection was changing hands for an average of 3.5 Ether (ETH), or around $8,000 when they were first listed on April 18, 2022, but were trading for around 0.009 Ether, or roughly $16 as of April 21, according to OpenSea. Nike shut down RTFKT in January, which the class suit claims decimated investors when “prices plunged and did not recover,” and also took away the chance to take part in the challenges and quests, which the group argued was a primary reason for purchasing the tokens. Related: RTFKT’s CloneX avatars reappear after issue blacks out NFTs The overall NFT market dropped sharply in the first quarter of 2025, with sales plunging 63% year-over-year, to $1.5 billion in total sales from January to March 2025, down from $4.1 billion during the same period in 2024. Nike did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Magazine: Financial nihilism in crypto is over — It’s time to dream big again Two Ethereum community members, Kevin Owocki and Devansh Mehta, proposed a dynamic fee structure for the Ethereum application layer to strike a balance between revenue generation for app builders and fairness in fee extraction. The April 27 proposal outlined a simple equation that uses a square root function that proportionally lowers the percentage of fees as the funding capital allocated to a particular project grows. Owocki and Mehta explained: “For smaller funding amounts, the fee follows a square root function (sqrt(1000 x N)), providing proportionally higher returns to make building mechanisms for smaller pools worthwhile. For example, if the funding pool is $170,000, then the root of 1000 x 170,000 equals $13,038.4 or 7% is taken as overhead.” The authors of the proposal added that fees would be capped at 1% once a particular application’s funding pool crossed the $10 million level, ensuring that small app builders can develop decentralized applications without excess fees while also encouraging project and funding growth by capping fees as developers scale their applications. Owocki and Mehta’s proposal to balance revenue generation and profitability among Ethereum’s app builders reflects the growing calls to reform fee structures and value accrual mechanisms to maintain Ethereum’s economic viability against competing networks. Related: Ethereum’s L2 approach equals many high-throughput chains — Avail exec In 2024, the Solana ecosystem onboarded more developers than the Ethereum network, attracting 7,625 new developers compared with Ethereum’s 6,456. Despite the surge in software developers building on the Solana network in 2024, Ethereum remains the dominant ecosystem for attracting developer talent, although the 2024 data shows that position is no longer uncontested. According to onchain analytics firm Santiment, Ethereum fees dropped to five-year lows in April 2025 due to low activity on the Ethereum base layer resulting from reduced demand for smart contract operations like decentralized finance. This reduced demand is leading to many institutions scaling back their Ether (ETH) holdings or selling off portions of their investment as investor sentiment toward the first-ever smart-contract platform continues to erode without any clear catalysts for a reversal. Magazine: Ethereum is destroying the competition in the $16.1T TradFi tokenization race Arthur Hayes, Murad’s Prediction For Meme Coins, AI & DeFi Coins For 2025 Expert Sees Bitcoin Dipping To $50K While Bullish Signs Persist 3 Voting Polls Show Why Ripple’s XRP Price Could Hit $10 Soon Aptos Leverages Chainlink To Enhance Scalability and Data Access Bitcoin Could Rally to $80,000 on the Eve of US Elections Crypto’s Big Trump Gamble Is Risky Institutional Investors Go All In on Crypto as 57% Plan to Boost Allocations as Bull Run Heats Up, Sygnum Survey Reveals The Future of Bitcoin: Scaling, Institutional Adoption, and Strategic Reserves with Rich Rines
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Vast majority of hackers use mainstream cryptos
Monero accepted at Spar stores in Switzerland
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Ethereum’s competitors ramp up heat as Ethereum faces revenue crunch
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