- Meta 1 scammer Robert Dunlap tried to claim he had settled his case against the SEC with a fake bond
- Dunlap and the Meta 1 team owe $27 million, and Dunlap tried to claim he had agreed a $44 million bond payment with the judge
- The SEC has denounced this as yet another Dunlap lie
The man at the head of the Meta 1 scam, a cryptocurrency that said it was backed by billions of dollars in gold and fine art holdings, tried to settle his case against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with a fake surety bond. Robert Dunlap, who earlier in his scamming career tried to get out of a Land Rover loan by saying that banks didn’t have a constitutional right to lend money and so he didn’t need to pay it back, told the court that he had agreed a $44 million surety bond with U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Lane at the end of January, when in fact no such arrangement had been made and Dunlap had instead filed “nonsensical” papers.
Backed by Billions in Gold and Fine Art
Meta 1 came on our radar back in 2020 with its outrageously bad whitepaper, which promised that the token related to the blockchain was backed by billions of dollars in gold and fine art. Dunlap and his fellow founders took in $13.4 million worth of investment before the SEC issued an emergency halt order, saying that the project was simply a scam that promised the world (including a 225,000% increase in the token price) but was in fact nothing but an empty shell.
After failing to acknowledge any communications from the SEC, probably because Dunlap and his cohorts don’t believe in the role of government or the authority with which it is imbued, the group was handed a $27 million penalty in September last year. This was recommended by Judge Lane in February and was sent for approval to District Judge Robert Pitman for approval.
Dunlap Faked $44 Million Surety Bond
In the interim, Dunlap filed a ‘settlement of litigation and demand for closure’ of the case, marking his first ever involvement or even acknowledgment of the charges against him. This purported to be an agreement between himself, on behalf of Meta 1, and Judge Lane, with a $44 million ‘bond package’ apparently having been agreed between them and settling the case. Even on the surface the amount was a little odd, being 63% higher than the agreed penalty for all transgressors, and seems initially to have been plucked from the air. However, it bears a striking resemblance to the $44.44 sale price of the Meta 1 token as stated in the whitepaper.
It didn’t take long for the SEC to cry foul, however. The following day it filed a motion to strike the document from the record, clarifying that neither Dunlap nor anyone from Meta 1 has settled the matter and that no settlement discussions have “ever occurred”. It then eviscerated Dunlap’s filing and gave the rationale behind it:
(Dunlap’s filing) is a nonsensical document that follows Dunlap’s pattern of deception in his illegal, on-going Ponzi scheme whereby he submits a made up document in the litigation he has defaulted in, in order to point investors to a document that makes them believe that he has paid the recommended judgment and reached a settlement with the SEC, which are lies. This conduct further evidences the need for severe penalties here.
The day after this filing, Judge Pitman confirmed Judge Lane’s recommendations of a $27 million penalty, meaning that bank accounts belonging to Dunlap and his band of scammers will be frozen and the SEC will attempt collection on them.
While the net is finally closing in, the fact that this complex case has been going on for so long suggests that it might not quite yet be over.
