According to Telegram, Aurélien Michel, the son of former Guingamp player Claude “Coco” Michel, was arrested at New York airport on January 4. He is accused of fraud over three million dollars from NFT buyers.
The son of Claude Michel, alias Coco, is in trouble with American justice. The Telegram reports this Saturday that Aurélien Michel was arrested on Wednesday January 4 at JFK airport in New York on his way to the United Arab Emirates, where he resides. He is suspected of cryptocurrency fraud, estimated at three million dollars.
The 24-year-old allegedly defrauded buyers of his NFT Mutant Ape Planet collection, according to a US Department of Justice document. The former Lannion and Ploumagoar player would have carried out a rug pull (carpet draw). In other words: he attracted investors to his collection of NFTs, before disappearing while keeping the latter’s money.
“The community has become too toxic”
Aurélien Michel was presented to a New York judge on January 5. He is accused of having “intentionally devised a scheme or artifice to defraud individual holders of cryptocurrency, in order to obtain from them money or goods by means of one or more pretexts, representations and promises materially false and fraudulent”, between December 2021 and December 2022.
In his defense, the son of Coco Michel claims that he never had “the intention of ‘pulling the rug'”, adding that “the community has become far too toxic”.
