A Texas man who spent 5 years defrauding almost 1,000 buyers 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 expenses; earlier this month, a decide 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 referred to as the “Meta-1 Coin” by a car he dubbed the “Meta-1 Coin Belief”. He informed potential buyers the coin was backed by as a lot as $1bn in fantastic artwork and $44bn in gold, and falsely claimed that an accounting agency had audited and licensed the worth of the gold. The alleged artwork assortment was stated 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 buyers for years, telling them that he had created a protected funding for them,” assistant US attorneys Jared Hasten and Paige Nutini stated in a joint assertion. “Dunlap’s fraud scheme brought on almost 1,000 buyers to lose greater than $20m. Lots of the sufferer buyers misplaced all of their financial savings.”
Adam Jobes, a particular agent-in-charge of Inside 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 concentrating on cryptocurrency fraud as regulators and regulation enforcement companies search to tighten oversight of the digital-asset market. On the similar 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 verify on digital-asset fraud like Dunlap’s rip-off.
