SEC v. Russell Armand, Maxwell Hernandez, Manpreet Singh Kohli, and Nam Tran (paid crypto market making, 2024)

Settled

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In October 2024 the SEC charged Russell Armand, Maxwell Hernandez, Manpreet Singh Kohli and Nam Tran in the District of Massachusetts over alleged paid crypto market making. On April 15, 2025 the court entered consent judgments against Armand and Hernandez that include injunctions and an officer-and-director bar, with disgorgement, interest and any penalty left to a later motion; the docket shows Kohli's case stayed and then amended in September 2026.

The record

What was ordered

Civil penalty

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Disgorgement

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Prejudgment interest

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Total relief

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Alleged gain

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A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars.

What is alleged to have happened

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed this complaint on October 9, 2024 and announced it on October 15, 2024 as litigation release LR-26155, in civil action 1:24-cv-12586 in the District of Massachusetts. The defendants are Russell Armand, Maxwell Hernandez, Manpreet Singh Kohli and Nam Tran (4 individuals, 0 entities). Earlier versions of this record merged the first three names and counted two individuals.

The complaint alleges that the four promoted the Saitama Inu and SaitaRealty crypto assets, offered as securities to retail investors, with misrepresentations about a planned "Saitama ecosystem" of products, falsely said they were buying or holding while secretly selling, and manipulated the markets themselves and by hiring ZM Quant Investment Ltd. and Gotbit Consulting LLC to generate artificial volume or move prices. It charges Securities Act Sections 5(a), 5(c) and 17(a) and Exchange Act Sections 9(a)(2) and 10(b) and Rule 10b-5.

Armand and Hernandez consented to bifurcated settlements, subject to court approval (granted April 15, 2025, as described below), that enjoin them, impose conduct-based injunctions and bar them from serving as officers or directors, with disgorgement, interest and penalties to be set by the court. The claims against Kohli and Tran were not part of those settlements.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above.

Outcome. The docket in SEC v. Kohli (D. Mass. 1:24-cv-12586) shows the court approving assented consent-judgment motions and entering judgments as to Russell Armand and Maxwell Hernandez on April 15, 2025. We read Armand's judgment: he consented without admitting findings, and it enjoins him from violating the antifraud, registration and price-manipulation provisions cited, bars him from serving as an officer or director of a public company, restrains him from taking part in securities offerings other than for his own account, and provides that disgorgement, interest from July 2021 and any penalty will be decided on a later SEC motion. We found no later order setting amounts, so none is stored; Hernandez's judgment text was not opened. The docket also shows Kohli's case administratively stayed on April 29, 2025 because of a parallel criminal case and an amended complaint filed on September 3, 2026, so his claims remain unresolved. This outcome covers Armand and Hernandez; Nam Tran does not appear in the docket entries we saw and we did not check his case.

What technique is this, and how does it work?

This action is tagged with one technique in our taxonomy. The tagging is ours: regulators charge statutory provisions, not technique names, so the mapping is an editorial judgement described in our editorial policy.

• Paid crypto market making — see how it works, what statute it engages, and every other action tagged the same way.

Timeline

1. 2024-10-09 Complaint filed (D. Mass.)
2. 2024-10-15 Litigation release published
3. 2025-04-15 Consent judgments entered as to Russell Armand and Maxwell Hernandez

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

• SEC litigation release
• Judgment as to Russell Armand (D. Mass. 1:24-cv-12586, Doc. 38), via CourtListener
• Docket, SEC v. Kohli (D. Mass. 1:24-cv-12586), via CourtListener

The linked release is a work of the United States government and is not subject to copyright. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Related actions

Other actions in the library sharing at least one technique tag with this one.

Record added September 20, 2026. submit a correction.