A man in the United States has been sentenced to 23 years in prison for orchestrating a $20 million cryptocurrency scam.

April 17th — A Texas man, Robert Dunlap, was sentenced to 23 years in federal prison and ordered to pay restitution to victims by Judge LaShonda A. Hunt, the U.S. Department of Justice announced. The conviction stems from Dunlap’s orchestration of a cryptocurrency scam that defrauded nearly 1,000 investors of more than $20 million. Between 2018 and 2023, Dunlap claimed to run a crypto company and sold a fake digital asset called “Meta-1 Coin” via the “Meta-1 Coin Trust.” He made multiple false statements to potential and actual investors: alleging the token was backed by up to $1 billion in art (including works by Picasso, Dalí, and Van Gogh) and $440 billion in gold; falsely asserting an accounting firm had audited the gold and certified its value. To conceal he never actually possessed the gold or art, Dunlap forged legal documents.