The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed charges against a developer of Solana (SOL) non-fungible tokens (NFTs) who allegedly defrauded investors.
According to a recent news release, the DOJ has charged Vietnamese national Le Anh Tuan with one count of conspiracy to conduct financial crimes and one count of conspiracy to commit international wire fraud in relation to the NFT investment community Baller Ape Club.
“Shortly after the first day Baller Ape Club NFTs were offered to the public, Tuan and his accomplices participated in what is known as a ‘rug pull,’ terminating the putative investment project, erasing its website, and taking the investors’ money,”
Tuan and his accomplices reportedly stole over $2.6 million from traders before trying to launder the proceeds by changing them to various crypto assets across many blockchains and using decentralised currency swap services to cover their traces.
“According to blockchain analytics, Tuan and his accomplices laundered investors’ funds through ‘chain-hopping,’ a form of financial fraud in which one type of coin is converted to another and resources are moved all over multiple cryptocurrency blockchains and used decentralised cryptocurrency swap services to disguise the trail of Baller Ape investors’ stolen funds.
Tuan and his accomplices collected around $2.6 million in total from investors. According to the Department of Justice, this is the biggest NFT conspiracy ever prosecuted. Tuan faces a potential sentence of forty years in jail if convicted.
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