A Texas man who spent 5 years defrauding practically 1,000 traders by a fictitious cryptocurrency scheme will spend the subsequent twenty years in jail. Robert Dunlap was convicted final yr by a federal jury within the Northern District of Illinois on mail fraud prices; earlier this month, a choose in Chicago sentenced him to 23 years in federal jail and ordered him to pay full restitution to his victims.
From 2018 to 2023, Dunlap claimed to function a cryptocurrency enterprise promoting a purported digital token known as the “Meta-1 Coin” by a car he dubbed the “Meta-1 Coin Belief”. He informed potential traders the coin was backed by as a lot as $1bn in positive artwork and $44bn in gold, and falsely claimed that an accounting agency had audited and authorized the worth of the gold. The alleged artwork assortment was mentioned to incorporate works by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Vincent van Gogh. Federal investigators discovered that Dunlap had manufactured bogus authorized paperwork expressly to maintain the phantasm, and that he by no means possessed the gold or the artwork.
Prosecutors argued that Dunlap confirmed no contrition all through the case and grew solely bolder because the fraud continued. “Defendant lied to traders for years, telling them that he had created a protected funding for them,” assistant US attorneys Jared Hasten and Paige Nutini mentioned in a joint assertion. “Dunlap’s fraud scheme triggered practically 1,000 traders to lose greater than $20m. Most of the sufferer traders misplaced all of their financial savings.”
Adam Jobes, a particular agent-in-charge of Inner Income Service Legal Investigation in Chicago, described the human toll in stark phrases. “Robert Dunlap didn’t simply take cash; he took years of laborious work, belief and monetary safety from his victims,” Jobes said.
The case is amongst a rising variety of US federal prosecutions focusing on cryptocurrency fraud as regulators and regulation enforcement businesses search to tighten oversight of the digital-asset market. On the identical time, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to roll again the regulatory framework that prosecutors and investor advocates have lengthy argued is the one significant test on digital-asset fraud like Dunlap’s rip-off.
