TL;DR Breakdown
- Jimmy Gale Watson pleads not guilty to scam chares alongside McAfee.
- Pump and Dump among charges slammed against Jimmy Watson.
Jimmy Gale Watson Jr an executive advisor of the McAfee team while in court pleaded not guilty to a suit charging him with being involved in crypto scams that duped investors of about $13 million. Jimmy Watson who was a navy seal previously and a bodyguard to the John McAfee who developed the McAfee antivirus said he was not involved in the two wholesale crypto scams.
The alleged scam principal, John McAfee is currently cooling off in a prison in Spain for tax evasion he committed in October 2020. US authorities are seeking ways to extradite the cybersecurity engineer so he can face a litany of charges. He is alleged in the US of failing to submit tax returns for 2014 to 2018 while earning millions from “promoting cryptocurrencies, consulting work, speaking engagements, and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary.
Charges brought against McAfee executive, Watson
The defendant is alleged to have defrauded investors through a crypto scam money laundering, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit commodities and securities fraud.
Jimmy Watson on the other hand is accused of being involved in pump and dump schemes in 2017 and 2018. In the indictment claim, he was alleged of purchasing large sums of altcoin at low prices endorsing them publicly to thousands of followers of the cybersecurity expert.
After retail investors purchased and prices of these coins went up, the group secretly dumped the coins. One of the most promoted cryptos was Docademic, followed by Burstcoin, with McAfee alleged to have charged as much as $105,000 per promotional tweet. Other crypto-assets such as Verge, Reddcoin, and Dogecoin have also reportedly been part of tweets labeled “Coin of the day” or “Coin of the week,” spanning from December 2017 to February 2018.
Alongside this, Watson is alleged of touting initial coin offerings via McAfee’s Twitter account while “concealing that the ICO issuers were compensating McAfee and his team for his promotional tweets with a substantial portion of the funds raised from ICO investors.” He pleaded not guilty to all these charges.
Watson was arrested on 04 March in Texas, following which he pled not guilty to the charges read to him. His attorney Arnold Spencer, argued that as a decorated veteran and a former Navy seal, Watson has always fought for other citizens’ rights and liberties.
