Texas Man Gets 23 Years for Crypto Scam That Invoked Picasso, Dalí and van Gogh
A federal judge in Chicago has sentenced Texas resident Robert Dunlap to 23 years in prison for running a cryptocurrency fraud that prosecutors say drained more than $20 million from nearly 1,000 investors. Dunlap, who was convicted last year in the Northern District of Illinois on mail fraud charges, was also ordered to pay full restitution.
From 2018 to 2023, Dunlap promoted a token called “Meta-1 Coin” through a vehicle he called the “Meta-1 Coin Trust.” To lure investors, he claimed the digital asset was backed by as much as $1 billion in fine art and $44 billion in gold. He also said an accounting firm had audited and certified the value of the gold, a claim investigators later found to be false.
The supposed art holdings were said to include works by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Vincent van Gogh. Federal investigators concluded that Dunlap never possessed the gold or the art and had fabricated legal documents to keep the scheme alive. In court filings and statements, prosecutors said he showed no remorse as the fraud expanded.
Assistant US attorneys Jared Hasten and Paige Nutini said Dunlap “lied to investors for years, telling them that he had created a safe investment for them.” Adam Jobes, a special agent-in-charge of Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation in Chicago, said Dunlap “didn’t just take money; he took years of hard work, trust and financial security from his victims.”
The case arrives amid a broader wave of federal prosecutions aimed at cryptocurrency fraud, even as the Trump administration has moved to loosen parts of the regulatory framework that prosecutors and investor advocates say remains essential to policing digital-asset scams. Dunlap’s sentence underscores how art, gold and the language of legitimacy can still be used to dress up a familiar fraud.
