Roger Ver, known as ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ and the founder of Bitcoin.com, has been detained in Spain following charges by the U.S. Department of Justice for tax fraud.
Authorities are seeking his extradition to the United States, where he faces charges of mail fraud, tax evasion, and filing false returns.
According to law enforcement, Ver allegedly concealed his ownership of the first cryptocurrency from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), resulting in losses amounting to $48 million.
In June 2017, two of the accused’s companies held approximately 70,000 BTC, which he later appropriated, concealing the information from his accountant, and “sold tens of thousands of them on cryptocurrency exchanges for about $240 million.”
“Although Ver was not a U.S. citizen at the time, he was still legally required to report to the IRS and pay taxes on certain income, including dividends from MemoryDealers and Agilestar, which were American corporations,” the Justice Department’s materials state.
The entrepreneur also used legal services to prepare and file false tax returns that undervalued his two companies.
Ver resided in Santa Clara, California, but renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014 after obtaining a passport from Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean.
Earlier, Charles O. Parks III, a resident of Nebraska, USA, also known as CP3O, was charged with stealing $3.5 million from cloud computing services for cryptocurrency mining.
In April, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison for money laundering and other illegal activities.