On 28 May 2026, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Nathan Fuller, a resident of Cypress, Texas, in connection with a crypto asset trading scheme in which he allegedly raised approximately $12.3 million from about 150 investors based on a series of misrepresentations and omissions, chief among them a claim that proprietary AI-based trading bots would perform high-frequency arbitrage in crypto asset markets on investors' behalf.DOCUMENTED
According to the SEC's complaint, Fuller offered and sold joint-venture interests in the trading scheme through his company, Privvy Investments, LLC, and under the assumed business names Privvy Investments and Gateway Digital Investments — a structure that allowed the same underlying pitch to be presented to different groups of investors under different names, without necessarily connecting the entities in investors' minds.DOCUMENTED
- The SEC's complaint covers conduct from at least October 2022 through mid-2024 — roughly a year and a half of alleged solicitation.
- Fuller allegedly offered joint-venture interests in the scheme through Privvy Investments, LLC and under the assumed names Privvy Investments and Gateway Digital Investments.
- Approximately 150 investors are alleged to have contributed the $12.3 million raised — an average of roughly $82,000 per investor.
- This is a litigated SEC complaint, not a settlement; the allegations are contested and have not been proven in court, and Fuller is entitled to defend against them.
A recurring template: the AI-branded pitch
This case sits alongside a wider pattern of 2025-2026 SEC actions targeting crypto schemes marketed with AI branding — the promise of an algorithm that trades faster, more consistently, and more profitably than a human investor, used as the credibility hook for an investment that, according to regulators, does not perform anywhere near as claimed once the money is actually deployed (or, in some cases, not deployed for trading at all).REVIEWED
Separately, the SEC has charged a cluster of purported crypto platforms and "AI investment clubs" — Morocoin, Cirkor, Berge, and several affiliated entities — with defrauding retail investors of more than $14 million using nearly identical marketing mechanics: social media advertisements to establish first contact, private group chats to build trust and social proof, and claimed AI trading credentials to lend the whole operation a veneer of technical sophistication that ordinary investors have no independent way to verify.REVIEWED
Why "AI" functions as a credibility shortcut
The recurring feature across these cases is not the specific technology claimed but the function it serves in the sales pitch: a technical-sounding credential that investors are asked to trust without being able to verify it themselves, in the same way earlier generations of investment fraud relied on claimed insider connections, proprietary trading algorithms, or offshore banking relationships that were equally unverifiable to an outside investor. AI branding appears to have simply replaced the previous generation's unverifiable credibility marker with a new one that carries particular cultural weight at this moment.
For prospective investors, the practical lesson embedded in this pattern is that a claimed technology's sophistication is not, by itself, evidence that it exists or performs as described — a lesson that applies whether the pitch involves an AI trading bot, a proprietary hedging strategy, or any other claim that cannot be independently audited by the person being asked to invest.
Sources behind this report
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