The developer behind the Mutant Ape Planet non-fungible token (NFT) collection – a knockoff of the Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs – pleaded guilty on Tuesday to defrauding buyers in a rug pull that netted almost $3 million, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

Aurelien Michel, a French citizen who lived in the United Arab Emirates, was arrested earlier this year in New York. He faces up to five years in prison and has agreed to pay $1.4 million in forfeiture, according to the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

“Our office is acutely aware that criminal actors are taking advantage of the constant pace of innovation in the digital asset space and the investing public’s desire to become involved in cryptocurrency to perpetrate large-scale frauds," said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace.

When the Mutant Ape Planet buyers began realizing they'd been duped by the developers, authorities say that Michel, posting under the pseudonym “James”, admitted to the rug pull in the community’s Discord channel.

“We never intended to rug but the community went way too toxic,” the developer posting as “James” wrote. “I recognize that our behavior led to this.”

Regulations Rug Pull NFT Department of Justice Criminal Plea Deal

Jesse Hamilton

Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.