The developer of a Mutant Ape Yacht Club knock-off collection has been arrested in New York and charged with defrauding investors of $2.9 million.
The arrest took place on Jan. 4 in New York, with homeland security agents alleging that French national Aurelien Michel perpetrated a rug pull scheme and stole nearly $3 million from investors for his own personal use.
Internal Revenue Service agent Thomas Fattorusso was quoted in a press release from the Department of Justice as saying that Michel defrauded investors by making false representations of, amongst other things, giveaways, tokens with staking features, and merchandise collections.” But Michel withdrew the funds once the NFTs were sold out.
According to the statement, Michel admitted to the community via a social media chat that he had perpetrated a rug pull, saying we never intended to rug but the community went way too toxic.
The collection which is a knock-off of the popular Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT collection consists of 6,797 NFTs stored on the Ethereum blockchain. The collection has had a total of 567 Ether in sales but has seen its average price and sales volume crater since it launched in January 2022.
