United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, announced that VADIM KOMISSAROV, the former Chief Executive Officer of Trident Acquisitions a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company, pled guilty today before U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein to securities fraud for his role in a scheme to defraud TDAC investors and investors in TDAC’s successor company, Lottery.com Inc by publicly reporting false and misleading revenue and business information. KOMISSAROV is scheduled to be sentenced on June 24, 2026.

“Vadim Komissarov, the former CEO of Trident Acquisitions Corp., defrauded his shareholders,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton. “He manufactured fraudulent revenue and then obstructed the SEC’s investigation, including by lying under oath. Whether it be SPACs or any other capital raising vehicles, when executives fabricate revenue and mislead our markets, this Office and our partners will pursue them vigorously.”

According to the Indictment, plea agreement, and statements made in court:

From November 2020 through May 2022, KOMISSAROV engaged in a scheme to defraud TDAC investors and investors in TDAC’s successor company, Lottery.com Inc., by publicly reporting false and misleading revenue and business information about a prospective acquisition target and by profiting from the effect of the deception by selling shares of Lottery.com before other market participants realized the true state of the company (the “Revenue Scheme”).

The Revenue Scheme arose from an effort by KOMISSAROV to identify a suitable target for TDAC before TDAC reached a deadline to either use or return investor funds that had been raised to support an acquisition. In November 2020, KOMISSAROV settled on AutoLotto, Inc., d/b/a Lottery.com as a target for TDAC. To deceive TDAC shareholders about the nature of AutoLotto’s business, and to thereby secure their approval for TDAC’s acquisition of AutoLotto (the “Business Combination”), KOMISSAROV worked with others to improperly and misleadingly inflate AutoLotto’s revenue and to report those inflated figures to TDAC’s shareholders through public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), which KOMISSAROV signed or caused to be filed as the principal executive, financial, and accounting officer of TDAC.

The Revenue Scheme created the false appearance of revenue-generating business activity for AutoLotto and later for Lottery.com through a series of sham transactions, including a fraudulent $9 million roundtrip transaction that KOMISSAROV engineered using the alias “Vlad.”