Theta Labs embroiled in fraud scandal: former executives jointly report CEO for manipulating token prices

【BlockBeats】Blockchain project Theta Labs is in big trouble. On December 17, two former executives of the company, Jerry Kowal and Andrea Berry, filed whistleblower lawsuits simultaneously in Los Angeles Superior Court, directly targeting CEO Mitch Liu and the company itself.

Their allegations are shocking: years of fraud, market manipulation, and retaliation against whistleblowers. More specifically, Liu is accused of using Theta Labs and its parent company Sliver VR Technologies to artificially inflate token prices through a series of misleading collaborations and covert insider token sales.

The legal team representing Jerry Kowal was particularly harsh—stating outright that Liu has turned Theta Labs into his personal trading tool, engaging in fraud, self-dealing transactions, and market manipulation. These carefully orchestrated pump-and-dump schemes repeatedly wiped out the assets of investors and employees.

Even more notably, Liu is also accused of generating false quotes for NFTs. This involves celebrity influence—some high-profile collaborations for NFT projects include stars like Katy Perry, but these may just be superficial.

Andrea Berry’s lawsuit points to another scam: Theta previously claimed to have a strategic partnership with Google, but in reality, it was just a routine cloud service agreement exaggeratedly packaged as a strategic alliance.

What’s more painful is that the lawsuit uncovered two cases of self-serving transactions—those so-called “partners” that Theta touted are actually shell companies founded and fully controlled by Liu himself. In other words, it’s a series of transactions with himself, aimed at creating a false illusion of ecological prosperity.