Sunday December 18, 2022, Aurélien Michel vibrated, from the stands of the Lusail stadium, where he attended the final of the Football World Cup, ideally placed to film Kylian Mbappé’s successful shot on goal. The highlight of a dream stay in Qatar: great hotels, good restaurants, and “ten games, including the final, the best game of my life”he wrote on Instagram.
Three weeks later, on January 4, there was a radical change of mood: when he got off the plane at John F. Kennedy airport in New York, this 24-year-old Frenchman was arrested by the police. After a night in police custody, he was presented to a judge at the federal court in Brooklyn, who decided to keep him in detention pending trial.
For the American authorities, Mr. Michel is the main mastermind of an NFT scam (non-fungible tokens, non-fungible tokens in English) well established, which would have allowed him to siphon nearly 3 million dollars (2.7 million euros) from gullible investors. According to the indictment, Aurélien Michel was the main administrator of the “Mutant Ape Planet” project, a series of virtual images of monkeys which was a plagiarism of the famous “Mutant Ape Yacht Club”, one of the most highly rated NFT collections in the world. The project promised early investors a host of benefits and rewards, and assured them that the value of their virtual images would skyrocket thanks to an extensive online marketing campaign.
Except it was all wrong. After collecting several million dollars in cryptocurrencies, the creators of the project simply left with the fund in February 2022 – a rug pull (literally “pulling the rug” in English), in the jargon of the crypto-active community. Both the project website and the Discord chat server have been shut down. Now unsaleable, the project’s NFTs no longer have any value.
According to documents published by the American justice, Aurélien Michel, alongside other unidentified people, would have extracted the equivalent of 2.9 million dollars in cryptocurrency from the victims of the scam. Project administrators also reportedly claimed on social media that they initially had no intention of leaving with the investors’ money, but that “the community had become too toxic”. The investigators managed to link a telephone number and two e-mail addresses belonging to Mr. Michel to the account to which all the cryptocurrencies of the investors were transferred.
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