CipherBlade founder Richard Sanders filed a lawsuit against the firm's current executives, accusing them of stealing assets and falsifying documents.
Sanders founded the Pennsylvania-based company in 2019, which helps federal government agencies, private companies and individuals investigate blockchain-related financial crimes.
According to the statement, when Sanders went on a volunteer trip to Ukraine in 2022, the project began to have problems. Defendants Manuel Kritz and Michael Krause convinced the company's founder to give them access to his email address while he was on a business trip.
“Knowing that Sanders would be in Ukraine, before and immediately after his departure, defendants misrepresented him in order to gain access to his accounts. They violated trade secrets by stealing confidential investigative information, customer information, etc., and also stole access to the CipherBlade PA business itself,” the document says.
The defendants allegedly referred clients to a competing company in Alaska and Singapore. When Sanders began to suspect something was wrong, he asked for Critz to be fired, but that never happened.
“Kritz continued to cooperate with CipherBlade PA and conspired with other defendants to participate in the [criminal] scheme,” the statement alleges.
While still overseas, Sanders received alerts from his home security system that his security cameras had been turned off. Returning home, the head of CipherBlade discovered that business documents were missing.
“For all of these reasons, I have no choice but to publicly sever ties and warn everyone that I no longer control or are affiliated with CipherBlade,” Sanders wrote on LinkedIn.
Company representatives responded on social media that Sanders was never the owner and has “refused active participation in CipherBlade operations” in recent years.
Let us recall that in August, the co-founders of the gaming blockchain platform Gala Games, Wright Thurston and Eric Schiermeyer, filed lawsuits against each other on charges of theft and embezzlement of company assets worth $130 million.
