Oyster Protocol founder gets 4 years jail for $5.5M tax evasion

cointelegraph.com:

Amir Bruno Elmaani, the 31-year-old founder of the now-defunct cryptocurrency scheme Oyster Protocol has been handed the maximum sentence of four years in prison for tax evasion.

The United States Attorney’s Office said on Oct. 31 that Elmaani — also known by the alias “Bruno Block” — was sentenced to prison following his April 6 guilty plea where he admitted to secretly minting and selling Pearl tokens while not paying income tax on a swathe of profits from the project.

Elmaani admitted that he caused tax losses of over $5.5 million.

“Amir Elmaani violated the duty he owed to pay taxes on millions of dollars of cryptocurrency profits, and he also violated the trust of investors in the cryptocurrency he founded,” said District Attorney Damian Williams in relation to the sentencing.

Between September and October 2017, Elmaani promoted a cryptocurrency called Pearl (PRL), marketed as a way for investors to purchase data on a blockchain-based data storage platform called Oyster Protocol.

However, under the nose of the Oyster Protocol’s team and investors, Elmaani secretly minted a mass of new PRL tokens and dumped them on the market for his own personal gain in October 2018.

“On or about October 29, 2018, I used the smart contract to mint new PRL, without telling anyone, including others who worked on the Oyster Protocol project. I then sold these newly minted PRL on a digital trading platform,” Elmaani admitted in his plea agreement.

“I was aware that the counterparties who were buying these newly-minted PRL likely were not aware of my reopening of the smart contract and did not know that I had just substantially increased the total supply of PRL,” he added.

Despite raking in millions of dollars from the exit scheme, Elmaani