Centra Tech
A 2017 ICO that sold the CTR token and, per the SEC, raised over $32M by touting nonexistent partnerships with Visa, Mastercard, and Bancorp. Co-founder Sohrab Sharma was sentenced to 8 years.
Also known as: Centra, CTR Token
Summary
Centra Tech ran a 2017 initial coin offering (ICO) selling the CTR token. The SEC says it raised over $32 million by promoting nonexistent partnerships with Visa, Mastercard, and Bancorp. [1][2]
Misrepresentations
According to the SEC, the founders fabricated executives — including a fictitious Harvard-educated CEO — and false banking partnerships. The ICO was boosted by paid celebrity endorsements; Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled later settled SEC charges for failing to disclose they were paid to promote it. [1][2]
Outcome
Co-founder Sohrab "Sam" Sharma was sentenced to 8 years in prison; co-founders Robert Farkas and Raymond Trapani were also convicted. [2]
Bracketed numbers refer to the numbered sources listed below.
Sources (2)
See also
World Liberty Financial (WLFI) — Justin Sun token freezeProjectsWLFI, a DeFi project linked to Donald Trump and his family, blacklisted/froze the wallet of major investor Justin Sun in Sept 2025 — ~540–595M unlocked WLFI tokens (~$107M) plus ~2.4B locked. Sun sued, alleging an undisclosed admin 'blacklist backdoor'; WLFI denied it and threatened a countersuit. The dispute is ongoing.
Gala Games exploitTokensOn May 20, 2024 an attacker abused a privileged minter account on the GALA token contract to mint 5 billion GALA (≈$200M+ nominal) and dumped ~600M of them for ~$22M of ETH before Gala froze the address. Gala Games called it an internal access-control failure; the attacker later returned the ~$22M.
This page was last updated on Jun 15, 2026. View revision history.
