The Founder of Oyster Protocol Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison for Tax Evasion
Amir Bruno Elmaani, also known as ‘Bruno Block’, founder of the Oyster Protocol platform, has been sentenced to four years in prison for tax evasion.
The verdict was delivered by the US Attorney’s Office on October 31, following his guilty plea in April. Elmaani admitted to secretly creating and selling Pearl (PRL) tokens without declaring the generated income, resulting in a tax loss of over $5.5 million.
‘Amir Elmaani violated his obligation to pay taxes on millions of dollars in cryptocurrency profits, and he also violated the trust of investors in the cryptocurrency he founded,’ the prosecutor’s office stated.
An Over $5.5 Million Fraud
Elmaani launched a cryptocurrency called Pearl between September and October 2017, which was presented as a solution for purchasing data on the Oyster Protocol platform.
However, in October 2018, he secretly created a large number of new PRL tokens, which he sold on the market for his own benefit. Despite earning millions of dollars through this scheme, Elmaani reported a total income of only $15,000 in 2017 and no income in 2018.
In addition to his prison sentence, Elmaani has been sentenced to one year of probation and ordered to pay $5.5 million in damages.
This story once again reminds us that the US justice system does not take tax fraud lightly, especially when millions of dollars are involved.
