According to CoinMeta, Wu said that Trevon James, a former promoter of Bitconnect, stated that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is seeking a court order for him to return approximately $2.3387 million in illicit gains and pay about $939,300 in pre-judgment interest, totaling around $3.278 million. Court documents show that SEC experts tracked the bitcoins he received from Bitconnect from April 2017 to January 2018 through on-chain transactions. Trevon James claimed that 111 of these BTC were later stolen by hackers, but this did not result in a reduction to the amount to be recovered by SEC. SEC sued Trevon James and other Bitconnect promoters in 2021, accusing them of participating in the promotion of unregistered securities worth over $2 billion.