INVESTIGATION: Indicted Republicans and a dead Belarusian — what happened to Organic Fresh Coin?
A Republican political consultant recently indicted for his role in a $12-million real estate scheme was the vice president of crypto project Organic Fresh Coin, which ran an illegitimate initial coin offering (ICO) in 2018, Protos can reveal.
Federal prosecutors say GOP donor and supposed real estate mogul Keith Ingersoll, alongside associate James Adamczyk had been bilking an investor for millions of dollars over the past six years.
The pair claimed to be holding the funds in escrow while transacting real estate across the United States. In reality, Ingersoll and Adamczyk allegedly spent the cash on “luxury car rentals, travel, and adult entertainment.”
Authorities say the scheme ran until late 2021, during which time Ingersoll served as an executive of Organic Fresh Coin (OFC) — a peculiar food-themed cryptocurrency that supposedly raised at least $15 million in a 2018 ICO.
According to the indictment filed in the Middle District of Florida last November, Ingersoll and Adamczyk prevented the unnamed investor from withdrawing funds from their real estate operations.
They said Adamczyk was trapped in Central America with COVID-19 and had to be physically present at a bank to withdraw the money.
On another occasion, Ingersoll contrived a non-existent company to buy out the victim’s partial stake in the real estate ploy.
Ingersoll even created an email account to pose as employees of the fake company to assuage their investor’s doubts.
Even worse, the attorney appointed by Ingersoll and Adamczky to oversee the account had been suspended since 2008.
When the suspended attorney died, Adamczyk falsely claimed to be an attorney and assumed oversight of the non-existent escrow fund.
Ingersoll’s consulting firm, K.I. Consulting, also had a contract with Joel Greenberg, the former Seminole County tax collector co-operating with federal prosecutors in their investigation of a wide-ranging tax fraud and sex trafficking scheme that embroiled US congressional representative Matt Gaetz in controversy last spring.
K.I. Consulting was contracted by Greenberg’s tax agency to acquire real estate for the Seminole County tax collector, a contract for which auditors said there was no evidence of work.
On May 1, 2017, Ingersoll curiously purchased an old bank building in Winter Springs, Florida on behalf of Greenberg — for $130,000 more than Adamczyk’s company Shooters Orlando had acquired the property that same day.
Organic Fresh Coin wanted to track who touched your fruit
Ingersoll was named Executive Vice President in the whitepaper for Organic Fresh Coin, an Ethereum-powered ICO that in 2018 claimed to have attracted $15 million in investment.
Ingersoll is alleged to have been defrauding the unnamed real estate investor during this time. The details of his involvement in Organic Fresh Coin are previously unreported in mainstream press.
Marketing materials for Organic Fresh Coin claimed it was developed by the same team behind a raft of failed shitcoins including Plaak (PLK), WeGo, and KodakCoin, among others.
Organic Fresh Coin says it sought to provide full seed-to-table visibility into food supply chains. The board released promotional material touting that the tech would allow users to know “the person working that day who touched your fruit or vegetable.”
According to the whitepaper, this was to be possible through a combination of RFID tags and QR codes.
Unlike other blockchain projects that track food, this one specifically included its own native token, intended to enable “local farmers and consumers to interact in a new economic model, without the middleman.”
It’s unclear how that new economic model would’ve worked. As well, there’s several discrepancies between on-chain Organic Fresh Coin activity and how the project claims its ICO was conducted.
On-chain, it appears that there was a total supply of 350 million Organic Fresh Coins, according to Etherscan.
The Organic Fresh Coin website claimed to have reached the project’s token sale “soft cap” of $15 million. It also advertised two exchange rates: the standard rate of one OFC per $1, and the special rate of one OFC per $0.50 for early investors.
There was also a purported “hard cap” for the ICO, $55 million, which apparently wasn’t reached. The token was never listed on exchanges.
Most OFC tokens sent to just one wallet
In July 2019, nearly all publicly available OFC tokens were transferred to one cryptocurrency wallet.
This is peculiar, as most ICOs that reach their soft cap distribute tokens among investors, rather than to a single honeypot address.
If Organic Fresh Coin truly raised $15 million, then contributors should’ve received an amount of tokens in return, scaled to their investments.
But in that single wallet sits about 300 million OFC, equal to 86% of the token’s total supply. It’s also roughly the same as the 88% that the ICO’s executives claimed would be available to the public (86% of Organic Fresh Coin’s $15 million soft cap is $12.9 million).
The 10% of OFC’s supply supposedly set aside for the project’s “founders and team” matches the amount of OFC sitting in another separate wallet.
(Perhaps coincidentally, 86% of the OFC soft cap also mirrors the $12 million Ingersoll and his partner Adamczyk were indicted for bilking from the investor in the aforementioned real estate scheme.)
The remaining OFC tokens, around 4% of the total supply, were distributed between several dozen other wallets. The majority of these only ever received OFC and have not made any other transactions, indicating they were activated just to receive OFC.
A minority of these wallets seem to have had other interactions. They often sent the OFC to another wallet that only ever received OFC.
Read more: [Analysts discover $800M in Ether ‘recycled’ to pump Block.one’s EOS ICO]
In fact, there are currently 62 wallets that hold OFC, and there have been only 94 total transactions since its creation. This suggests a perfunctory level of usage and demand.
There’s no evidence that OFC was ever used outside the context of the ICO.
Aside from being named Executive Vice President in the Organic Fresh Coin whitepaper, Ingersoll also incorporated Organic Fresh Coin to the same office suite as his consulting firm.
Employees of Ingersoll’s real estate firm Ingersoll Group, Justin Morrow and Tyler Shears, were also given titles at Organic Fresh Coin — Chief Operations Officer and Director of Technology respectively.
Organic Fresh Coin’s shady insiders
Ingersoll is known in Central Florida politics as a capable financier.
Orlando Sentinel journalist Jason Garcia in November noted that Ingersoll’s name appeared on a list of donors who would help cover money stolen by a consultant from a Florida political action committee.
Indeed, a member of a central Florida sheriff’s political campaign was reportedly once introduced to Ingersoll as the opposition’s “money man.”
Two Ingersoll associates were also connected to Organic Fresh Coin. The first is Adamczyk, Ingersoll’s alleged partner-in-crime who was indicted for the real estate scheme alongside Ingersoll.
Adamczyk was tagged as a partner in an Organic Fresh Coin LinkedIn post.
The second Ingersoll associate linked to Organic Fresh Coin is Christopher Aaron Miller, who in January 2018 promoted the cryptocurrency on social media and was photographed with the crypto’s executives.
Ingersoll held a post on the auxiliary police force of Belle Isle, Florida but was removed in 2012 due to his association with Miller, who had outstanding warrants related to felony theft and fraud.
Not to mention, former tax collector Greenberg — whose agency hired Ingersoll’s company K.I. Consulting to acquire real estate — pleaded guilty this year to six federal charges of sex trafficking, stalking, wire fraud, and defrauding a public office to purchase cryptocurrency.
Among pretenses Greenberg offered to cover what prosecutors described as prolific criminality were his efforts to develop the tax collection agency’s capacity to transact business in crypto.
Greenberg housed a crypto mining operation on tax collector property and formed a company called Government Blockchain Systems LLC in July 2019, now defunct.
Two other Ingersoll’s also appear in Organic Fresh Coin’s whitepaper, James and Jim, believed to be Keith’s father and brother respectively.
Enter, Belarus
Ties between Ingersoll, Greenberg, and Organic Fresh Coin appear to coalesce as the cryptocurrency market neared a peak in December 2017.
At the time, Greenberg began acquiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in short-term loans from government offices.
On January 4, 2018, Organic Fresh Coin LLC was incorporated to the same office suite as Ingersoll’s company K.I. Consulting, which had a contract with the Greenberg tax agency.
Most notably, Organic Fresh Coin’s executive summary and public relations material associated the ICO with Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarusian government, which in late 2017 legalized cryptocurrency to incentivize private sector development.
The Organic Fresh Coin whitepaper claimed: “The OFC mission is supported by a direct partnership with the government of Belarus, located in Eastern Europe. OFC is starting with over 20 million acres of existing land available for farmers to expand into.”
A promotional video even stated that “OFC is the first cryptocurrency in history to be backed up by the Republic of Belarus and is a legal ICO.”
The advisory board for the ICO included Mikhail Morgulis, a dissident of the former Soviet Union who in 2015 was named Honorary Consul of Belarus to the Florida consulate.
In addition to his stated role in the executive summary, Morgulis was photographed with Ingersoll and Organic Fresh Coin president Yulia Konstantinova at functions related to the development of the crypto token.
Amid reports that his Russian diaspora organization was shuttering, Morgulis’ Facebook account acknowledged his death on November 16, 2021.
Though no cause of death is mentioned, Morgulis purportedly prepared the statement to be released posthumously.
Last June, The Daily Beast reported that the FBI started investigating the finances of Morgulis’ Coordinating Council of Russian Compatriots of the US, and its role in rallying supporters for former US president Donald Trump in 2020.
Organic Fresh Coin still a mystery
Ingersoll associate Greenberg’s sentencing for six charges related to sex trafficking, wire fraud, and defrauding the tax agency to purchase crypto was delayed for a second time in October.
Prosecutors are continuing to explore a criminal operation that has led them “to some places we did not expect.”
Greenberg’s lawyer said the delay was essential to his client’s ongoing co-operation with the investigation.
In October — just before the indictments were released — Ingersoll was pulled over outside of a Mission BBQ restaurant in Orlando.
Despite a seizure order on his license plate and no valid driver’s license, Ingersoll attempted to evade a ticket by showing two invalid law enforcement credentials, and making reference to his high profile arrest last year for driving under the influence.
Ingersoll’s indictment indicates his real estate scheme dated back to 2016 and continued through 2021 — concurrent with Organic Fresh Coin’s ICO and the criminal activity of Greenberg.
Per his indictment, Ingersoll had access to millions of illegally obtained US dollars (from the real estate scheme) during this period, and through Organic Fresh Coin was on the executive board of an initial coin offering that never circulated beyond a few dozen wallets.
Nearly all of the coin’s supply rests in just two wallets today.
Read more: [Tether Papers: This is exactly who acquired 70% of all USDT ever issued]
It is unclear exactly why Organic Fresh Coin existed, or why there was no further developments since 2018. This is despite OFC supposedly raising $15 million (for scale, Ethereum is considered to have raised around $18 million in its ICO).
However, after Ingersoll’s indictment for wire fraud, it’s worth weighing the utility of ICOs in this particular criminal enterprise.
- A person seeking to legitimize illicit funds can re-enter them into the banking system through the purchase of crypto (via a broker like Chainalysis’ ‘Rogue 100’ or another over-the-counter trading desk with lax policies).
- The launderer then needs to find a justification to sell that crypto for cash and to re-integrate it into the banking system.
- Conducting an ICO provides a reason for money launderers to obtain and sell cryptocurrencies. Token sales provide an entity for putting illicit funds back into the banking system.
Techniques similar to this were allegedly used in a major ICO from 2018 called Dragon Coin.
Protos attempted to reach Organic Fresh Coin for comment. The phone number on its website was no longer accepting calls, the contact email was undeliverable, and the corporate entity dissolved.
We’ve pursued other domains in a bid to learn more from Organic Fresh Coin directly, and we’ll update this piece should we hear back.
Our journalists also attempted to find a public contact for Ingersoll through his association with the Ingersoll Group, but their website no longer exists.
In any case, it must be noted that we have no direct proof that Organic Fresh Coin was a money laundering operation.
But peculiarities related to Ingersoll’s other alleged offenses, the wrongdoing of others closely associated with Organic Fresh Coin like Adamczyk, and a curious partnership with the Belarusian government make Organic Fresh Coin one of the strangest ICOs — ever.
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Thanks to @gal_suburban for assisting and reporting from COINTELPRO Podcast.
Edit 21:24 UTC, Jan 4: Joel Greenberg started acquiring cash via short-term loans from government offices, rather than directly from Florida chief financial officer Jimmy Patronis, as was originally noted. Also clarified Ingersoll’s involvement with Organic Fresh Coin had yet to be widely reported.