A federal judge in Illinois sentenced Robert Dunlap to 23 years in prison on Tuesday for helping run the Meta-1 Coin fraud. Prosecutors said the scheme took $20 million from nearly 1,000 investors. Judge LaShonda Hunt also ordered Dunlap to repay the victims. The case centered on false claims that the token had backing in gold and fine art assets.
Dunlap served as a trustee of the project that marketed the so-called Meta-1 Coin. Prosecutors said he and others sold the token through the Meta-1 Coin Trust from 2018 to 2023. According to the case, Dunlap and his co-conspirators told investors that the token was backed by a $1 billion art collection. They also claimed it was backed by $44 billion in gold.
Authorities said those claims lacked credible proof. They said the project drew investors with promises of safety and enormous returns, including claims that buyers could earn returns up to 224,923%.
In November, a federal jury in the Northern District of Illinois convicted Dunlap on two counts of mail fraud. Each count carried a possible sentence of up to 20 years in federal prison. Prosecutors told the court that Dunlap kept lying as the years passed. In their sentencing memo, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jared Hasten and Paige Nutini said he showed no remorse.
The government said Dunlap also created the Meta Exchange website. There, he and others used automated trading bots to inflate both the token’...
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