Former En Avant Guingamp player Aurélien Michel was arrested in New York. He is accused of defrauding nearly $3 million.
In the United States, on Wednesday 4 January, Aurélien Michel, a footballer passing through Guingamp, was arrested at New York airport, while he was traveling to the United Arab Emirates, where he lives. He is suspected of cryptocurrency fraud, in the amount of $3 million.
2.9 million euros, this would be what would have defrauded Aurélien Michel, a footballer who moved to En Avant Guingamp and son of former player Coco Michel.
1/ The arrest of Aurelien Michel (@aureiienmichou) shows how incompetent and amateurish some criminals really can be.
Michel is a French citizen who resided in the UAE. He founded the Mutant Ape Planet NFT collection and defrauded his community of $2.9 million. pic.twitter.com/Woi8ngFPT7
— Muqsit Haider (@MHofIRP) January 7, 2023
He is alleged to have attracted investors to his personal collection of NFTs, and to have disappeared keeping these investors’ money, once all of his NFTs were sold.
Thursday, January 5, he confronted a judge in New York. According to an official US Department of Justice document, Aurélien Michel is suspected of having “intentionally devised a scheme or contrivance to defraud individual holders of cryptocurrencies, in order to obtain money from them or property by means of one or more materially false objects and fraudulent pretexts, statements and promises”, for the period from December 2021 to December 2022.
