Kik Founder Sentenced to DEATH for Securities Fraud
BREAKING NEWS:
This morning, Sunday 6/9/2019, Ted Livingston, Founder and CEO of thinly veiled prostitution and drug dealing app Kik was sentenced to DEATH by SEC Executioner Jay Clayton for fraud, disrespect, and running an unregistered securities sale with his Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for the KIN token in 2017.
Our reporters sat watch at the trial, taking in the impact of this unbelievable outcome. Ted Livingston sobbed uncontrollably on the stand as the verdict was read, “I was only trying to sell sticker packs to underage girls!” We saw a broken man weeping in front of us, and wondered to ourselves how sticker packs could lead to this.
Kik was a dying VC backed Series D company just months away from financial failure when it decided to “pivot” and raise money through an ICO. Mr. Livingston had somehow blown through $120 million dollars of his investors’ money on a simple messaging platform. With no path to monetization or acquisition in sight, Ted realized he was in the hole for money that had no chance of ever being recovered. Afraid of being banished from Silicon Valley and disinvited from liberal sex parties, Mr. Livingston turned to his investor and friend Fred Wilson, partner and founder of Union Square Ventures, for advice on how to turn the sinking ship around. He recounted the conversation for our reporters from his cell.
“Let me get this straight. You lost my money, have no assets left to sell, and need to come up with $100 million out of thin air?” He thought for a moment and his cartoon eyes lit up in an a-ha moment.
“Blockchain Technology!” Fred Wilson excitedly exclaimed as he slammed his fists onto the table at Philz Coffee, his hot Ether roast splashing onto his lap, forcing his assistant Kyle Samani to gently sop it up with a napkin. “This is all part of your training Kyle, it’s good for you.” he said as Kyle wiped his crotch, lingering just a moment too long.
Photo courtesy of Twitter
Ted Livingston had never heard of “Blockchain Technology”, let alone how to use Cryptocurrency to scam money from uneducated investors.
“Everybody in the Valley is doing it now; it’s standard stuff, you’re behind the times. You’ll do an Initial Coin Offering, or as I call it an “asymmetric investment.”
He continued, “The gist of it is to trick retail investors to give you millions of dollars by selling them illiquid fantasy tokens without giving them any equity or voting rights in return! Kind of like your sticker packs, completely useless. Wait — hold on — that’s a good idea, let’s sell your sticker packs for tokens too. Kyle, please write that down.”
Mr. Livingston nodded on, quietly soaking in all of the wisdom his mentor had to offer. “You don’t even have to let them read your faked financials. You can use the money to both pay me back and monetize your terrible business at the same time. It’s brilliant. I’m brilliant. Here, I would like to connect you with someone I know, he knows the token game better than anybody. His name is William Mougayar, I consider him a thought leader in scamming young entrepreneurs and a personal friend. Check out his book, I usually keep my copy on me but I lent it to the CEO of ParagonCoin. Kyle, please get Ted a copy.”
Ted Livingston later shared with our reporters that he walked away from that meeting concluding that an ICO was Kik’s only option and agreed to meet with Mr. Mougayar only out of desperation.
At the time, Mr. Mougayar was hosting his first big conference called Token Summit in New York City during Blockchain Week; the largest seminar on how to steal money the world had ever seen. Mougayar, unsatisfied with the income generated from the conference and his small token advisory allocations, needed a bigger project to satisfy his greed. He agreed to help Kik’s Ted Livingston on Fred Wilson’s behalf in exchange for a large advisory token allocation in their newly created coin, KIN, and to sit on the KIN Foundation’s board of directors. After all, how is a token really decentralized without a foundation. The two decided to scam the world together by doing what every nonsensical project does with no value, build hype.
Don’t let him eat your token allocations.
After months of smoke and mirrors and possibly also defeating Spider-Man, Mr. Mougayar (pictured above) had now set the stage for the largest announcement of a big consumer company entering the blockchain space in history. Everyone was unsure of who the big reveal would be. Was it Apple? Microsoft? No. In the most disappointing blueball in history (before Block.One’s June 1st 2019 announcement), KIN was unleashed onto the world like a bad case of SARS.
Everyone who participates in the Kik ICO is going to make a ton of money. The token will list on all the major exchanges and pump to the moon. By participating in this crowd sale, this is your opportunity to become venture capitalists in Kik and get rich like we are.
Ted Livingston
Man who broke every single securities law possible in one statement.
Around this time in Washington D.C., SEC Executioner Jay Clayton was furiously playing racquetball in his men’s league when he was hurriedly interrupted by an intern rushing in to tell him that a company run by a Canadian man had actually pulled off a scam, joining the only other two Canadian scams in history: QuadrigaCX, and the Toronto Raptors currently winning in the NBA Finals.
(Mr. Livingston later confided in our reporters that before the ICO he was actually warned by Canadian regulators that he would be engaging in an unregistered security offering that didn’t pass the Howey Test but he didn’t listen to them because his maple infused Canadian brain was warped from listening to too much Drake.)
After a power shower and taking his daily laxatives, Jay Clayton was back in the office to find a group of disgruntled investors including Olaf Carlson-Wee and Joey Krug from Polychain and Pantera Capital, waiting to complain that their scams didn’t go the way they had planned. They whined that their KIN tokens were illiquid and could only be used to buy sticker packs.
“What the hell am I going to do with $3,000,000 in sticker packs? I’m not an underage girl actually trying to use Kik!” yelled a frustrated Joey Krug.
Jay Clayton’s offices reached out to Kik for comment, who claimed that they had produced a working currency with 300,000 users spending KIN monthly. We tried to fact check this by finding one actual Kik user that had ever used the KIN token but couldn’t find anyone. We interviewed Tinder bots, hookers, sexual predators, drug dealers, and high schoolers but alas — even Kik’s main audience didn’t know about KIN.
Photo courtesy of the long dick of the law.
In October 2018, Kik received a “Wells Notice” from the SEC, which is a letter politely informing the recipient that their lives are about to become more difficult. Jay Clayton ordered Ted Livingston to pay the standard SEC fine of $250k per $100 million stolen — all proceeds going to the SEC Chestahedron Softball League. Ted Livingston, in a moment of completely unfounded stupidity, defiantly rejected this settlement thinking he was untouchable and posted the Wells Notice online in protest, becoming the first ICO to contest the SEC (and probably last.)
Over the next eight months the Kik team openly taunted the SEC using the excuse of helping the whole industry and playing the martyr card which “Dr. Peter McCormack” can now tell you is probably not the best idea. This angered Jay Clayton’s inner dragon as his blood boiled. How could it be that a Canadian so openly defied him? That evening Mr. Clayton made a final call to Ted Livingston offering him the deal of getting on his knees and kissing the tip and all would be forgiven. Kik’s response? Listening to Erik Voorhees and having the balls to launch a crowdfunding campaign to fight back. Our reporters were surprised that Livingston had listened to the biased Mr. Voorhees, seeing as how he had a vendetta against the SEC for shutting down SatoshiDICE and forcing him to return 50,000 BTC to his investors. Our condolences go out to Mr. Voorhees who at peak 2017 prices would have been a billionaire if he was allowed to fully live his libertarian dream of being selfish and disregarding all rules.
Today Mr. Livingston is crying from prison and pleading for his life after the SEC sentenced him to death for securities fraud, but in reality, for disrespecting the law. This is a Shakespearean tragedy of a man who pulled off one last scam to save his company, got away with it, and didn’t have the humility to kiss Jay Clayton’s tip just one time. While our reporters feel bad for this extreme outcome, who in their right mind doesn’t pay the SEC bribe? You always pay the SEC bribe.
When later interviewed from his cell on death row, Mr. Livingston told us he chose to bunk with Justin Sun who since being arrested for his illegal TRON gambling network had now cornered the prison sticker pack and cigarette market. Mr. Livingston told us he chose Justin as a bunkmate because if he were to drop the soap around him it probably wouldn’t hurt that bad.
Just like Ned Stark, Ted Livingston died thinking he had honor.
(he didn’t.)
This article is satire and for entertainment purposes only.
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