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The U.S. SEC has punished celebrities several times in recent years for promoting financial products. For example, reality TV star Kim Kardashian paid a $1.26 million fine for promoting a token on Instagram. But what should we do with a professional actor like John San Nicolas, who appears in ads for scams in exchange for payment? For example, he plays the CEO of Tesler Investments in a notorious crypto fraud campaign, which caught tens of thousands of victims for scams.
John San Nicolas (LinkedIn) is an actor from Portland who seems to need money and is apparently willing to work for scammers. This actor is a scam facilitator and should be brought to justice for his involvement in the investment scams. That probably won’t happen, but in any case, he should be put on stage and booed. The victims of the scams should be able to thank him.
This article is absurd.
An actor takes on a roll. Basically you could say all actors lie as they are portraying people following a script.
You do not charge an actor for being a serial killer in a movie.
Now things might be different if the actor was part of the crime or participated in some way. An actor follows a script.
A spokesperson on the other hand is quite different, they are using their name and reputation to endorse a product, this means they believe in that product, know that product and understand the words they are saying. A spokesperson is expected to use and trust the product they are endorsing with their name and brand and reputation.
An actor for a commercial does not put his name or reputation on the line, an actor is only reading a script and portraying a part
Except in this case the actor is claiming to be the CEO of the company that’s promoting the product (a product that happens to have been proven to be a scam). If the actor was pretending to be a customer, of course that’s not the same thing. I agree that the actor is probably not the key player in this scam. But he did play a big roll (a leading roll, if you will) in convincing a lot of people that he’s a trustworthy, philanthropic American genius. Without his roll in instilling confidence, a lot less people would have fallen for this. A textbook confidence trick.
*role
The point of the video is that the actor is neither a true spoke person or playing the role of a satisfied customer. He is pretending to be a spokesperson, & this video proves that he is not. He’s fictitious, & while he works in Portland, the “company” (scam operation) he was hired to act for (& the countless clones that steal the original videos) could be located anywhere in the world (one “whois” search on ICANN revealed the server for one “Tesler” website is located in Europe). What’s disappointing is that the actor is at least somewhat talented & seems to have already had a successful career with a lot of credits on his resume by late 2016 when the original videos were made, so one can’t help but speculate about motive.