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Comment by Beaver117 | Hacker News Reader

The SEC is awfully slow. They should have had enough to arrest him a long time ago and now he's probably living on billions in Russia or something

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> they should have had enough to arrest him a long time ago

The SEC is a civil agency. It can't arrest anybody.

They apply to a court to get a civil penalty. You can be arrested by a court for flouting a court order like “don’t leave the country pal”, once it has established jurisdiction through the service process. Detaining people to enforce court orders is one of the core powers of the judiciary. Bringing an action and serving him while he was inside the jurisdiction of the court would have been good.

Was he ever in the US? I thought he fled from South Korea.

Yes and yes. He is fleeing actual prosecution on criminal charges by the South Koreans.

He has even been served a subpoena by the SEC while in the US before. He was forced to sit down and respond to questions. He sued them about it because the SEC is supposedly not meant to serve you in public, but I suspect he was a pretty tricky guy to serve at all. Early enforcement would have been good, and it maybe would have required a bit of force given what we know about his flight risk.

https://news.bitcoin.com/sec-files-action-against-terraform-...

> apply to a court to get a civil penalty

“Apply” as in win a trial. That’s not quick. And it requires a track record of Kwon flouting the agency.

You apply to have the case heard. The judge says ok, you served him, I will exercise my jurisdiction and hear this, Mr Kwon, show up in court next Tuesday (or else). It should not result in detention in a normal case. But it can.

My guess would be they’re not slow, they probably just waited to release this info publicly until it was prudent or didn’t have the potential to damage their case. Since he’s in hiding now it seems like that’s precisely why they’re going public, to smoke them out.

“The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.”

Serbia as of December, it seems[1]!

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63940181

They also seem to be going after Terraform Labs, which is an active legal entity in South Korea (Edit: Actually appears to be Singapore now). Impeding their current work on (I kid you not!) Terra 2.0 may still prevent a future ponzi meltdown.

The joke is that the SEC steps in only after the money is lost. Or their actions cause a stock to tank and everyone loses their money anyway. When the SEC halts trading on a penny stock, when it resumes trading is instantly worthless or close to it, so again people lose money. Basically, the SEC is useless at preventing people from losing money.

Scams will always exist and scammers will always find new ways to scam people, no matter how many warnings there are. Advance fee scammers find are now doing crypto giveaways in which a victim sends 'x' crypto in the promise of '2x 'more. Crypto is the latest iteration of penny stock pump and dump scams.

The SEC kind of steps in as soon as they have reason to investigate, they even have a rather profitable whistleblower program (profitable for the whistleblower who gets between 10 and 30% of every fine above 1 million). The SEC is a civil agency charged with protecting "investors", not defrauded customers. The latter is, to the best of my knowledge, referred to prosecutors by the SEC (I think the southern district of New York).

The SEC can only bring civil charges. Their enforcement actions are also procyclical: They collect the bodies.

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