Las Vegas resident charged in $45 million metaverse scam that touted trillion-dollar returns
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Federal prosecutors alleged Friday that a Nevada man helped defraud 10,000 investors out of more than $45 million by touting a fake metaverse project with its own crypto token that would one day be sold for trillions of dollars.
Bryan Lee, a 57 year-old Las Vegas resident, was named in a superseding indictment over his involvement in an alleged investment fraud scheme called CoinDeal. Lee was charged with conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud and criminal monetary transactions. Indictments in the broader case date back to June of last year.
Lee worked alongside three other individuals to convince investors that CoinDeal was a legitimate family of businesses working towards developing virtual reality products, federal prosecutors alleged. Lee and his co-conspirators also said they were in talks with a potential “consortium of wealthy buyers,” according to the indictment.
CoinDeal’s promoters told investors that the funds were needed to pay for operating expenses until the sale was realized, with Lee and his co-conspirators promising significant returns. In reality, the alleged fraudsters spent lavishly on luxury cars and real estate, prosecutors said.
The superseding indictment says the conspirators falsely advertised the names of two billionaires as being part of the potential buying group. Billionaire-1 is described as the founder and executive chairman of an “online retailing company,” and Billionaire-2 as the founder and CEO of an “electric car company.”
While no names were attached in the indictment, those two descriptions match the characteristics of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (though he’s not actually a founder), two of the wealthiest people in the world.
Lee worked at the direction of Neil Chandran, who “held himself out as the owner” of the conglomerate, and alongside Michael Glaspie, a Florida man who helped collect investor funds, prosecutors said.
Lee was not named in a January Securities and Exchange Commission complaint. But Chandran and Glaspie were charged alongside five others for their roles in the CoinDeal investment scheme with the unregistered offer and sale of securities.
Prosecutors have also charged another unnamed co-conspirator, “Individual-1,” for allegedly raising and laundering money for Chandran. The SEC charged a Nevada man, Garry Davidson, who matches the description of Individual-1.
Chandran was arrested and charged in June 2022, while Glaspie pleaded guilty to wire fraud in February.
Chandran is described as a “recidivist securities law violator and convicted felon” in the SEC complaint. He and his backers “targeted mostly unsophisticated investors,” claiming that his technology would be sold for “trillions of dollars” to the fake billionaire-backed consortium, the SEC alleged.
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OpenAI’s new artificial intelligence video app Sora has already grabbed the top spot in Apple‘s App Store as its number one free app, despite being invite-only.
Sora, which was launched on Tuesday, allows users to create short-form AI videos and share them in a feed. The app is available to iPhone users but requires an invite code to access.
Here’s how to snag a Sora app invite code:
- First, download the app from the iOS App Store. Note that Sora requires iOS 18.0 or later to be downloaded.
- Login using your OpenAI account.
- Click “Notify me when access opens.”
A screen will then appear asking for an access code.
Currently, OpenAI has said that it is prioritizing paying ChatGPT Pro users for Sora access. The app is only available in the U.S. and Canada, but is expected to roll out to additional countries soon, the company said.
If you do not know someone who can provide an access code, several people are sharing invite codes on the official OpenAI Discord server, as well as on X and Reddit threads.
Once you input your access, you will be able to start generating AI videos using text or images. Users are also able to cameo as characters in their videos as well as “remix” other posts.
The app is powered by the new Sora 2.0 model, an updated version of the original Sora model from last year. The video generation model is “physically accurate, realistic, and more controllable” than prior systems, the company said in a blog post.
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OpenAI now has two of the top three free apps in Apple’s App Store, and its new video generation app Sora has snagged the coveted No. 1 spot.
The artificial intelligence startup launched Sora on Tuesday, and it allows users to generate short-form AI videos, remix videos created by other users and post them to a shared feed. Sora is only available on iOS devices and is invite-based, which means users need a code to access it.
Despite these restrictions, Sora has secured the top spot in the App Store, ahead of Google‘s Gemini and OpenAI’s generative chatbot ChatGPT.
“It’s been epic to see what the collective creativity of humanity is capable of so far,” Bill Peebles, head of Sora at OpenAI, wrote in a post on X on Friday. “Team is iterating fast and listening to feedback.”
Sora is powered by OpenAI’s latest video and audio generation model called Sora 2. OpenAI said the model is capable of creating scenes and sounds with “a high degree of realism,” according to a blog post. The startup’s first video and audio generation model, Sora, was announced in February 2024.
OpenAI said it has taken steps to address potential safety concerns around the Sora app, including giving users explicit control over how their likeness is used on the platform. But some of the initial videos posted to the app, including one that depicts OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shoplifting, have sparked debates about its utility, potential for harm and legality.
“It is easy to imagine the degenerate case of AI video generation that ends up with us all being sucked into an RL-optimized slop feed,” Altman wrote in a post on X on Tuesday. “The team has put great care and thought into trying to figure out how to make a delightful product that doesn’t fall into that trap, and has come up with a number of promising ideas.”
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