Texas Man Sentenced To 23 Years For $20m Meta-1 Coin Cryptocurrency Scam

A federal judge has sentenced a Houston man to more than two decades in prison for running a cryptocurrency fraud that stripped nearly 1,000 investors of their savings over five years.

Robert Dunlap, 55, was handed a 23-year prison term after prosecutors from the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois (@NDILnews) showed he had collected more than $20 million from victims between 2018 and 2023 through a scheme built almost entirely on fabricated claims.

Dunlap marketed a digital token called Meta-1 Coin through an entity he called the "Meta-1 Coin Trust." To attract investors, he told them the token was backed by up to $1 billion in fine art, including works attributed to Picasso, Dali, and Van Gogh, as well as $44 billion in gold he claimed had been independently audited and certified.

Prosecutors said none of those assets existed. Dunlap never held the gold or the artwork, and he produced fake legal documents to sustain the illusion. For many of the nearly 1,000 victims, the losses were total.

A federal jury convicted Dunlap on mail fraud charges last year. In addition to the prison sentence, the court ordered him to pay restitution to those he defrauded.