Kaching999
Galvanizer
A six-count indictment was unsealed today in Los Angeles charging two California men with defrauding investors of more than $22 million in cryptocurrency through a series of digital asset project rug pulls. Both men were arrested yesterday by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in Los Angeles. According to court documents, from May 2021 to May 2024, Gabriel Hay, 23, of Beverly Hills, and Gavin Mayo, 23, of Thousand Oaks, sponsored several NFT and other digital asset projects and undertook promotional activities in support of those projects.
They provided false and misleading project “roadmaps” detailing plans for the NFTs or other digital asset projects after their launch that the sponsors never intended to fulfill such as in promoting the Vault of Gems NFT project, Hay and Mayo falsely claimed that the project would be the “first NFT project to be pegged to a hard asset.” Hay, Mayo, and others allegedly used these tactics with a variety of digital asset projects, including Vault of Gems, Faceless, Sinful Souls, Clout Coin, Dirty Dogs, Uncovered, MoonPortal, Squiggles, and Roost Coin.
Hay and Mayo also allegedly used a variety of means to conceal their involvement in the fraudulent projects by falsely identifying other individuals or causing other individuals to be falsely identified as owners of the projects. When one project manager on the Faceless NFT project exposed Hay and Mayo as being behind that project, Hay and Mayo allegedly embarked on a harassment campaign against the project manager, sending or causing the sending of messages to the project manager and his parents for the purpose of intimidating him and his family and causing them great emotional distress.
Hay and Mayo are each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, two counts of wire fraud, and one count of stalking. If convicted, they each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on each of the conspiracy and wire fraud counts and a maximum penalty of five years on the stalking count.
Source
Insider Evidence:
They provided false and misleading project “roadmaps” detailing plans for the NFTs or other digital asset projects after their launch that the sponsors never intended to fulfill such as in promoting the Vault of Gems NFT project, Hay and Mayo falsely claimed that the project would be the “first NFT project to be pegged to a hard asset.” Hay, Mayo, and others allegedly used these tactics with a variety of digital asset projects, including Vault of Gems, Faceless, Sinful Souls, Clout Coin, Dirty Dogs, Uncovered, MoonPortal, Squiggles, and Roost Coin.
Hay and Mayo also allegedly used a variety of means to conceal their involvement in the fraudulent projects by falsely identifying other individuals or causing other individuals to be falsely identified as owners of the projects. When one project manager on the Faceless NFT project exposed Hay and Mayo as being behind that project, Hay and Mayo allegedly embarked on a harassment campaign against the project manager, sending or causing the sending of messages to the project manager and his parents for the purpose of intimidating him and his family and causing them great emotional distress.
Hay and Mayo are each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, two counts of wire fraud, and one count of stalking. If convicted, they each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on each of the conspiracy and wire fraud counts and a maximum penalty of five years on the stalking count.
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Insider Evidence:
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