"what they're doing with the money that a ton of people put in thinking that they would likely get it back."
Uh, why did they assume that? They can do whatever they want with their money.
The game does not require you to put money in to play. If you want to produce more in-game currency at a quicker rate you are free top spend some money on the game. It is not an investment.
The rules that people put money into the game under allowed people to get money back in the form of steem. This caused many people to view the risk as quite a bit lower than it actually was. Suddenly changing the rules and no longer giving out money in the form that they said they were going to could very easily be considered fraud, or breach of an implicit contract. They took quite a bit of money that people put in under one set of rules and changed the rules. You can look all over the legal system to see places where this is illegal.
Really where in the legal system does it talk about crypto? You will still be able to make steem? You did read the part where he talks about exchanging future coins for steem, correct?
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BitConnect is just one of the 90 cases the SEC and state regulators have launched during the past 24 months. The investigations come amid a two-year period in which cryptocurrency prices swung from all-time highs to steep lows.
One of the allures of cryptocurrencies — anonymity — is the reason the SEC and state regulators are expected to have little success returning any lost money. The WSJ mentioned comments SEC Chairman Jay Clayton made last year, in which he warned the SEC may not be effective in going after scammers and recovering funds invested in digital tokens. Part of the reason, Clayton said at the time, is that some of the proceeds end up outside the U.S.
https://www.pymnts.com/news/security-and-risk/2018/sec-cryptocurrency-bitcoin-scam/
Also they took money from no one. People upgraded buildings on their own. No one forced someone to upgrade anything. Many many people did not put anything in and still play the game.
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