REcoin / Diamond Reserve Club
Two 2017 ICOs run by Brooklyn's Maksim Zaslavskiy, marketed as tokens backed by real estate and diamonds that did not exist. The case produced the first U.S. criminal conviction for an ICO fraud; Zaslavskiy was sentenced to 18 months in 2019.
Also known as: REcoin, Diamond Reserve Club, DRC World, Maksim Zaslavskiy
Summary
In 2017 Maksim Zaslavskiy promoted two token offerings — REcoin (advertised as "backed by real estate") and Diamond Reserve Club / Diamond (advertised as backed by diamonds) — raising at least $300,000 from roughly 1,000 investors. Prosecutors and the SEC said the supporting assets and professional teams did not exist. [1][2]
Significance and outcome
A federal judge's 2018 ruling that the tokens could qualify as securities under the Howey test was an early, closely watched decision applying U.S. securities law to ICOs. Zaslavskiy pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and was sentenced in November 2019 to 18 months in prison — the first criminal conviction for an ICO-based fraud. [1][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.
