Don’t use crypto to cheat on taxes: Bitcoin bro gets 2 years
Early bitcoin investor first to get prison time for crypto-related tax evasion.
A bitcoin investor who went to increasingly great lengths to hide $1 million in cryptocurrency gains on his tax returns was sentenced to two years in prison on Thursday.
It seems that not even his most “sophisticated” tactics—including using mixers, managing multiple wallets, and setting up in-person meetings to swap bitcoins for cash—kept the feds from tracing crypto trades that he believed were untraceable.
The Austin, Texas, man, Frank Richard Ahlgren III, started buying up bitcoins in 2011. In 2015, he upped his trading, purchasing approximately 1,366 using Coinbase accounts. He waited until 2017 before cashing in, earning $3.7 million after selling about 640 at a price more than 10 times his initial costs. Celebrating his gains, he bought a house in Utah in 2017, mostly funded by bitcoins he purchased in 2015.