> Can you get in trouble for promoting fake money from Monopoly and trying to convince people that the collectible value of the Monopoly money will increase?

Monopoly money isn’t a security. ICO tokens are. Securities laws, including those requiring disclosure of sales incentives, apply to securities.

> It's an entity with a value specified by the eminent. If it's a fashion startup, one token can be equal to one dress or a yearly license of a software in case of a hi-tech startup. You even can issue tokens of yourself and a token holder will be able to buy an hour of your work with the token. You can “tokenize” everything.

From https://www.google.com.hk/amp/s/cointelegraph.com/ico-101/wh...

So basically if you top up your namecheap account it will count as a token? Looks like yes, from this definition. Please explain to me why I'm wrong.

Like any other thing the SEC would consider a security, it’s complicated and technical. The article refers to https://www.sec.gov/litigation/investreport/34-81207.pdf as the SEC’s basis for considering how “coins” relate to securities.

You may be right that your Namecheap account balance is a kind of token. But not all tokens are securities. The SEC is only interested in ones that are.

With something like trying to pump Monopoly money I imagine you'd just get hit will some flavor of fraud charge if someone bought, and maybe a conspiracy charge depend on whether or not you were paid to do it.

Yes? This is a basis of fraud and confidence schemes. Especially when it will enrich you.

The basis of fraud is not promoting something. It's deceiving someone. Not all promotion is fraudulent.

That being said, this particular regulatory disclosure requirement can arguably be considered a prohibition on a form of fraud, on the basis that all paid endorsements where the payment is not disclosed to the target audience are misleading the audience about the endorser's level of genuine interest in the product, and failing to disclose a materially significant fact about the endorsement that a reasonable audience would expect to be disclosed.

I'm not sure if a statutory rule is the best way to address this though. Its rigidity and one-size-fits-all approach may catch a lot of non-fraudulent actions in its net, and avoiding that should be the first priority of the justice system. Common law would better account for the peculiarities of each case and how they weigh into the question of whether an action is fraudulent.

> for failing to disclose payments they received for promoting investments in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs).

First paragraph.