Famed anti-virus pioneer John McAfee has been indicted on prices of cryptocurrency fraud, dollars laundering and much more.
The 75-12 months-previous, who is in Spain awaiting extradition to the US for tax evasion, is accused of conspiring with govt advisor Jimmy Watson and many others on two fraud schemes jogging from December 2017-Oct 2018.
The 1st was a classic pump-and-dump in which the defendants allegedly purchased significant quantities of publicly traded altcoins, promoted them on Twitter without having revealing their stake, and then sold them for a revenue.
The Section of Justice (DoJ) claimed McAfee, Watson and the many others made $2m from the scalping plan.
In the next scheme, McAfee, Watson and other folks employed McAfee’s formal Twitter account to encourage initial coin offerings (ICOs) without the need of disclosing they ended up currently being compensated by ICO issuers to do so.
This created them an believed $11m which the defendants subsequently tried using to conceal from traders. The duo are also alleged to have triggered another member of the team to launder the dollars.
McAfee and Watson, 40, are charged in a 7-depend indictment with just one count of conspiracy to dedicate commodities and securities fraud, a single count of conspiracy to commit securities and touting fraud, two counts of conspiracy to dedicate wire fraud and two counts of substantive wire fraud and 1 count of conspiracy to commit cash laundering.
The rates could direct to most sentences of many years powering bars and economic penalties.
“As alleged, McAfee and Watson utilized social media to perpetrate an age-outdated pump-and-dump scheme that attained them virtually $2m. In addition, they allegedly utilised the identical social media platform to market the sale of digital tokens on behalf of ICO issuers devoid of disclosing to buyers the payment they were getting to tout these securities on behalf of the ICO,” mentioned FBI assistant director, William Sweeney.
“When engaging in illegal action, basically getting new means to carry out previous tips won’t generate distinct results. Investment decision fraud and revenue laundering techniques have a strict penalty under federal law.”
McAfee was arrested in Spain final calendar year. The SEC has also submitted civil costs versus McAfee and Watson relating to the situation.
Some parts of this article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-magazine.com