Ichcoin Filed as an SEC Adviser Using an 87-Year-Old Stranger’s ID Number

On January 25, 2024, a company called Ichcoin Tech Corp., now known as WealthTutor Corp., filed a Form ADV with the Securities and Exchange Commission claiming status as an exempt reporting adviser. The form said the company was conducting business from an office in Albany, New York. It listed a telephone number in Colorado. It included a Central Registration Depository number, the identifier assigned through the FINRA system. According to the SEC, Ichcoin was not eligible to report as an exempt reporting adviser, it had no office at the Albany address, the Colorado telephone number did not connect a caller to anyone at the company, and the CRD number on the filing belonged to an 87-year-old individual with no identifiable connection to Ichcoin. When Commission staff asked the company to produce records substantiating what it had filed, it did not respond. On August 27, 2026, the SEC sued Ichcoin in the Northern District of New York.

The complaint charges Ichcoin with violating Sections 204(a) and 207 of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, and seeks a permanent injunction, a conduct-based injunction barring Ichcoin and anyone acting on its behalf from ever again filing a Form ADV as an exempt reporting adviser, and a civil penalty. Ichcoin was not an isolated filing. On the same day, the Commission brought parallel actions in the District of Colorado against 38 other entities over the same conduct.

Why a Form ADV Is Worth Faking

The value of the filing lies in a gap between what it is and what it looks like. An exempt reporting adviser is exempt from full SEC registration, but it is still required to file a Form ADV disclosing basic information about its advisory business. Crucially, the SEC does not review, approve, or verify those submissions before they become publicly searchable. A person who files one has not been vetted. They have filled in a form. But the resulting entry sits in an official government database, and a prospective investor who searches the firm’s name will find it there, alongside genuine advisers, bearing real-looking CRD and SEC file numbers generated by the filing process itself.

That is what makes the filing worth the effort. The SEC’s Office of Investor Education issued an alert in connection with these cases warning that scammers are using exempt reporting adviser filings to manufacture an appearance of legitimacy, and cautioning investors to be suspicious of any purported ERA that offers advice directly to individual retail investors or claims to be SEC-registered, since an ERA is by definition not registered. The FBI assisted through Operation Level Up, an initiative that identifies and contacts people who may already have been victimized.

38 More Filings With the Same Fingerprints

The Colorado complaints describe a pattern of filings that appear to have come off the same production line. The entities listed business addresses in Colorado where they had no presence. Their telephone numbers were disconnected or belonged to unrelated businesses. They disclosed ownership structures and numerical data that were identical or nearly identical across a large number of separate purported advisers. Each claimed that the financial statements of the private funds it supposedly advised had been audited by one of two independent accounting firms, and neither firm can be found in any public registry of federal or state accountancy firms.

Some of the entities were marketed on websites displaying fabricated certificates purporting to show SEC registration, constructed using the genuine-looking CRD and file numbers the filing process had produced, and falsely stating that the entity had received SEC permission to operate as a registered investment adviser. Several defendants connected to the Commission’s filing system using IP addresses traced to foreign jurisdictions. Like Ichcoin, they did not respond when Commission counsel asked for records. Several used crypto and Web3 branding, among them CryptoOrbit, Pinnacle Crypto Exchange, and Web3 University. The SEC directed FINRA to remove all 38 filings from the Investment Adviser Public Disclosure database, and one of the complaints references four related cases filed in the same district during 2025.

Someone Else’s Identifier

The detail that separates Ichcoin from the rest of the pattern is the CRD number. Fabricating an office address costs nothing and harms no one directly. Using a Central Registration Depository number that belongs to an actual 87-year-old person is different in kind. That number is the identifier attached to a real individual’s regulatory record. Placing it on a filing ties a stranger’s name, in the SEC’s own systems, to a company he has no connection to. The complaint does not say whether the person knew, or how his number was obtained. It says only that it belongs to him and that there is no identifiable connection between him and Ichcoin.

Conclusion

Ichcoin Tech Corp., which now calls itself WealthTutor Corp., told the federal securities regulator that it was an exempt reporting adviser operating from an office in Albany. There was no office. The phone number went nowhere. The registration identifier on the form belonged to an 87-year-old man who had nothing to do with the company. When the SEC asked for documents, nobody answered. The value of that filing was never in what it disclosed. It was in the fact that anyone searching the company’s name would find it in a government database. The SEC brought the same charge against 38 other entities the same day, pulled every one of those filings off the public system, and issued an alert telling investors that finding a firm in the database is not evidence that anyone checked.