CoinDeal executive indicted in $45M crypto fraud

Bryan Lee has been indicted for his involvement in CoinDeal, an alleged $45 million cryptocurrency fraud.

The various companies that made up this scheme were under the banner of ‘ViRSE’ and purported to be creating metaverse technologies and cryptocurrency.

The scheme claimed that investors would make massive returns once the companies were purchased by wealthy investors. To support this, they were told that the firms had the support of two billionaires, one who ran a massive online retail company, and another who ran an electric car company. This was allegedly completely untrue.

It’s claimed that the collected funds were misappropriated and used to purchase luxury cars and real estate.

Lee was the signatory for the various bank accounts used by ViMarket, one of the companies under the ViRSE umbrella. He allegedly used investor funds to purchase his personal home, justifying it by claiming that he could build a model of the house to use in the metaverse.

The property purchased includes a 6,000-square-foot five-bedroom, five-and-a-half bathroom house in Las Vegas, a 7,000-square-foot four-bedroom house in Las Vegas, and a 2,400-square-foot two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles.

Image from RedFin

Image from Zillow

Image from Zillow

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It’s claimed that more than 10,000 victims were convinced to invest in the scheme and that they put in a total of over $45 million.

Neil Suresh Chandran, who led the companies involved in the alleged scam, was indicted in June of 2022.

Also involved in the scheme — and also previously indicted — was Michael Glaspie, who marketed the ‘opportunity’ to prospective investors under the CoinDeal name. Glaspie was also previously indicted along with Chandran and pleaded guilty in February of this year.

CoinDeal was the name used to market this investment opportunity to prospective investors. Glaspie still uses the ‘Deal’ nomenclature on his personal website. The MikeGDeal site shows off two Bentleys — perhaps the luxury cars mentioned in the indictment — and describes how to earn money using the federal ‘Employee Retention Credit’ from the federal government.

Posts like this, describing how you can still benefit from his expertise in ‘network marketing,’ are interspersed with others that had to be removed “due to ongoing legal proceedings.”

Lee makes his first appearance in federal court today and Chandran has his next status conference scheduled for June 14.

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