Federal RICO suits say Lime chair Brad Bao helped give Cere Network cover as insiders allegedly dumped $41.78m in CERE tokens and left investors with a 99.8% price collapse.
Federal prosecutors’ years‑long pursuit of a crypto wash‑trading ring has spilled into Silicon Valley, with Lime executive chairman Brad Bao now facing two federal racketeering lawsuits totaling $157 million over alleged fraud at Cere Network. The civil cases build on a U.S. crackdown that has already seen Gotbit Ltd. founder Aleksei Andryunin plead guilty to wire‑fraud conspiracy, serve eight months in prison and forfeit $23 million in cryptocurrency after admitting to faking trading volume to pump token prices.
Court filings reviewed by outlets including International Business Times say investors have brought two separate RICO complaints in the Northern District of California, naming Bao, Cere CEO Fred Jin and other insiders. The first case, brought by Hong Kong‑linked investor group Goopal Digital Limited, seeks $100 million in damages, while a second suit by San Francisco investor Josef Qu demands $57 million, bringing combined claims to $157 million.
Both complaints allege Jin used market‑maker Gotbit to orchestrate wash trades on the November 2021 launch day of Cere’s CERE token, generating fake volume to mask a massive insider sell‑off. Cere is said to have raised about $42.96 million from more than 5,000 investors, many via token sales on Republic under Regulation D, before Jin and his associates allegedly dumped roughly $41.78 million worth of CERE on exchanges while promising that insider holdings were locked under vesting schedules.
According to price data from services such as CoinMarketCap and CryptoRank, CERE briefly traded near an all‑time high around $0.47 in early November 2021 but has since collapsed to roughly $0.00061, a drawdown of more than 99.8%. Qu says he invested in Cere through a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens in 2019, entitling him to 27,777,778 CERE tokens, but never received any allocation even as insiders allegedly moved their own tokens to exchanges “within hours” of launch.
Bao, who co‑founded scooter company Lime in 2017 and helped expand it to more than 280 cities worldwide, joined Cere’s board and, according to the complaints, lent his Silicon Valley credentials to help raise capital. The suits allege he received director’s fees and an early CERE allocation, approved financial transfers into accounts controlled by Jin, and used his reputation to reassure investors that Cere was a legitimate Web3 infrastructure project.
The Qu complaint adds so‑called “control person” claims under Section 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act, seeking to hold Bao liable as someone who exercised authority over an entity alleged to have violated federal securities laws, even if he did not personally execute every part of the scheme. Both suits also detail about $16.6 million in Cere treasury funds allegedly lost in high‑risk DeFi bets, including approximately $6.51 million on Mochi Protocol, $3.27 million in a CVX/ETH liquidity pool, $780,000 on Maple Finance and $345,000 in the failed Neutrino USDN system, all without investor consent.binance+1
The filings portray Jin as a serial founder who “established a pattern” of launching ventures, raising capital “under false pretenses,” extracting value and then moving on, tracing a line from mobile‑gaming firm Funler in 2016 to education‑blockchain venture Bitlearn in 2018 and finally Cere in 2019. Plaintiffs say he has already launched a new AI company, CEF AI Inc., allegedly funded with proceeds from the Cere scheme and now targeted by asset‑freeze requests covering corporate accounts, personal wallets and real estate in Germany and Florida.
For regulators, the Cere cases sit at the intersection of securities enforcement and criminal market‑manipulation work already familiar from the Gotbit prosecutions, where employees have been arrested at U.S. airports, extradited from Singapore and the firm ordered shut down. As the SEC continues to treat many token offerings as potential unregistered securities and the Department of Justice follows the wash‑trading trail, a token that has lost more than 99.8% of its value and spawned overlapping civil and criminal narratives is likely to remain on their radar.
Relevant crypto.news stories that can be linked as single words in the body include prior reporting on the $280 billion stablecoin market, a story on tokenised treasuries reaching $7.4 billion, and an analysis of institutional real‑world asset tokenization as a new market “backbone,” which together sketch the enforcement and market backdrop for the Cere litigation.