Known to his followers as Bitcoin Jesus, Roger Ver is a charismatic advocate of the cryptocurrency that’s once more charming investors with record-breaking profits. But to the Internal Revenue Service, Ver symbolizes a brand new goal within the digital age: a crypto holder suspected of failing to pay taxes after selling tokens.
U.S. prosecutors this 12 months accused Ver of evading greater than $48 million in taxes by selling $240 million value of tokens. It is the highest-profile case involving solely tax fraud and the sale of digital assets, and represents a break from the tradition of prosecutors taxing crypto cases for crimes similar to money laundering, ransomware attacks and investor fraud.
Ver, 45, is awaiting a Spanish judge's decision on whether he ought to be extradited to the United States following his arrest in April in Barcelona while attending a crypto conference. The US expatriate spent a month in prison before being released on bail and moving to Mallorca, where he received a gradual stream of holiday makers. An outspoken critic of the US government, he said he was being pursued by prosecutors.
“They don’t like me, and they don’t like my political views, and they just came after me in every way they could,” Ver said in an exclusive interview with Bloomberg News in late October.
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Ver said the Justice Department ignored evidence that helped his defense and refuted a central assumption of prosecutors – that he desired to defraud the Internal Revenue Service. Rather, he said he relied on professionals to advise him when IRS policy on taxing crypto sales remained unclear.
“I instructed all of my tax lawyers and accountants, ‘We have to do everything perfectly because I don’t want to have any problems with the IRS at all,’” Ver said. “That was her instruction all along.”
A Justice Department representative declined to comment.
The reason for Ver's legal jeopardy was his success as an early crypto investor – long before the recent Bitcoin rally fueled by Donald Trump's US presidential victory. The focus is on his representations to the IRS and the authority's reconstruction of his holdings.
Ver grew up in Silicon Valley and founded a pc company called MemoryDealers on the precocious age of 19. He also participated in tax protests and, at 21, ran for the California Legislature as a Libertarian.
In 2001, he pleaded guilty to dealing in explosives with no license. (Ver says he was simply selling fireworks on eBay.) He served 10 months in prison, which hardened his attitude toward the U.S. government. In 2006 he left America and moved to Japan. He focused on constructing MemoryDealers and one other company, Agilestar, which sold optical transceivers.
Spread the gospel
He co-founded Blockchain.com, a crypto company once valued at $14 billion, and was an early investor in payment processor BitPay and digital asset company Ripple. When the Bitcoin network underwent a software upgrade in 2017 that it rejected, Ver broke with the community and moved to a fork called Bitcoin Cash. He said his current holdings include Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether and Zeno.
Despite his fame, Ver decided to surrender his US citizenship in 2014 and later became a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis. U.S. residents who go abroad and are value greater than $2 million must report their worldwide assets to the IRS and pay an exit tax based on their asset sales.
As he planned to emigrate abroad, prosecutors alleged, Ver concealed the number and value of bitcoins he owned and controlled personally and thru his California-based firms, MemoryDealers and Agilestar.
The IRS used blockchain evaluation to find out that Ver and his firms owned about 131,000 Bitcoin in early 2014, which the indictment says traded between $782 and $960 – greater than he reported on tax returns. He is accused of tax evasion, wire fraud and filing a false tax return.
Ver worked with a law firm and appraisers on the exit tax, but gave them false or misleading details about his Bitcoin holdings, and an exit tax return filed in 2016 did not report the Bitcoins he personally owned and understated the worth of his businesses stated, based on the general public prosecutor's charge.
The indictment also accuses Ver of “fraudulently misrepresenting and concealing” from the IRS the cryptocurrency that his firms sold for about $240 million in 2017.
Ver disputes that characterization but declined to debate the fees further or elaborate on his crypto holdings with Bloomberg.
A web site, freerogernow.org, links to Ver's personal website and asks supporters to sign an open letter calling on the U.S. government to finish his “unfair prosecution.” It adds some details about his investigation, including allegations that IRS agents questioned his tax attorney in 2018 with no warrant and that there was a dispute over communications along with his attorneys.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case that didn’t name the parties but was specific to Ver's circumstances. The court dropped this case in 2023 without issuing a ruling.
If extradited, Ver's case can be the primary to face trial on purely crypto tax charges. In February, a Texas man, Frank Ahlgren, was accused of under-reporting capital gains from the sale of $3.7 million value of Bitcoin. Ahlgren pleaded guilty in September.
Ver, who has greater than 700,000 followers on X, was under IRS investigation for years while traveling the world. In 2021, he released a satirical video titled “Taxation is Theft.”
Ver was indicted under court seal on February 15, but only discovered about it weeks later when he was on the Privacy Guardians conference in Barcelona. His book “Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC” was just released. A police officer approached him within the lobby of the W Hotel, asked him to substantiate his identity and said he had an Interpol arrest warrant against him.
“The bottom dropped out of my stomach and I thought, 'Oh my God, the U.S. is going to do this to me again,'” Ver said.
Back to prison
After his arrest, Ver returned to prison, this time in a two-man cell in Spain. Some inmates mistakenly believed he was an American spy or undercover agent, he said.
“I didn’t tell anyone there who I was because I didn’t want to be blackmailed or have any problems with anyone,” Ver said.
Spain has been a detailed ally of the US in extradition cases. This 12 months, Spain sent Douglas Edelman, a former defense contractor, to face U.S. allegations that he evaded taxes on greater than $350 million in income. He pleaded not guilty and denies the allegations.
Ver said he spends his days in Mallorca chatting with his lawyers over Zoom, practicing Brazilian jujitsu and entertaining friends from overseas. He attended Bitcoin meetings and said he was well received there.
Ver appeared in an HBO documentary in regards to the origins of Bitcoin. A jiu-jitsu sparring partner said he saw him on the show.
“I said, 'If you don't mind, please don't mention this to anyone.' He said, 'Sure, no problem.' But he kind of grinned mischievously when he said that to me.”
–With assistance from Ava Benny-Morrison and Jorge Zuloaga.
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