Roger Ver, an early crypto investor who was sometimes referred to as "Bitcoin Jesus," has been charged for mail fraud, tax evasion and filing false returns in order to avoid paying at least $48 million in U.S. taxes.
Ver, who acquired the moniker after proselyting about Bitcoin everywhere he went in the cryptocurrency's early days, was arrested this weekend in Spain on the U.S. the criminal charges, according to the U.S. Justice Department's indictment.
The U.S. will seek Ver's extradition.
The charges are the latest by U.S. authorities against high-profile crypto entrepreneurs amid a crackdown on questionable practices in the embryonic sector over the past few years.
Changpeng Zhao, a co-founder of world's biggest crypto exchange Binance, was sentenced Tuesday to four months in jail. Sam Bankman-Fried, former chief executive officer of the FTX crypto exchange, received 25 years in prison.
Ver, 45, didn't immediately return a request for comment. The Justice Department declined to comment beyond the indictment.
U.S. authorities accuse Ver of failing to report capital gains or pay taxes on his holdings of Bitcoin, which he started to acquire in 2011.
While Ver renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a citizen of St Kitts and Nevis in 2014, he was still required to file U.S. tax returns that reported gains from certain assets such as Bitcoin, as well as fair-market value of those assets.
He was also required to pay tax on those gains.
By Feb. 4, 2014, Ver and his companies owned approximately 131,000 Bitcoin, the government said.
