Authorities in Spain have arrested Roger Ver, Bitcoin Cash advocate and a public figure often called “Bitcoin Jesus,” after the U.S. Department of Justice charged him with tax evasion.
In the indictment unsealed on April 29, the DOJ claimed that Ver evaded paying taxes amounting to $50 million, conducted mail fraud, and filed false tax returns. Ver is currently facing extradition to the United States to stand trial.
According to a freshly unsealed indictment, controversial Bitcoin Cash backer Roger Ver allegedly lied to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) about how much Bitcoin he and his companies MemoryDealers.com Inc. and Agilestar.com Inc. really owned, thereby causing the purported loss of $48 million.
The indictment notes that after renouncing his US citizenship in 2014 and securing citizenship in St. Kitts and Nevis, Ver failed to report capital gains and pay the requisite “exit tax” on his considerable Bitcoin assets. By 2014, Ver and his companies reportedly owned about 131,000 BTC, valued at approximately $871 each at the time.
The Feds further allege that the early Bitcoin investor provided inaccurate information to a law firm and an appraiser, resulting in the filing of tax returns that undervalued his businesses and omitted his personal BTC ownership. Ver sold 70,000 Bitcoins for roughly $240 million in 2017 — before the now famous bull run— but failed to inform the IRS about the gains he accrued, even though his U.S.-based corporations held the crypto.
“Ver allegedly concealed from his accountant that he had received and sold MemoryDealers’ and Agilestar’s bitcoins that year,” the Department of Justice continued. “As a result, Ver’s 2017 individual income tax return did not report any gain or pay any tax related to the distribution of MemoryDealers’ and Agilestar’s bitcoins to him.”
Ver has been involved in BTC since its early days. He earned the moniker of “Bitcoin Jesus” from reportedly giving away the alpha cryptocurrency for free. But he later switched to endorsing BTC hard fork Bitcoin Cash, and now claims the offshoot is the real Bitcoin.
For Bitcoiners like Dan Held, Ver has been a “net negative” for Bitcoin. Held asserted that Ver “deserves everything that he’s about to get” after he “nearly destroyed Bitcoin.”
