Inside the $9 Million Crypto Scam Backed By a State Senator and a YouTube Psychic

The Instagram presence of META 1 Coin, a “digital currency” backed by a former Washington state senator and a YouTube mystic who claims she can “channel the archangel Metatron,” has a few quirks. For one, the account favors photos of massive, gold coins that look like something a cartoon bandit would carry around in a sack marked “$$.” For another, it leans hard into hashtags, piling on labels like #dream, #live, #love, or #vsco, the photo editing app that became shorthand for zoomers with small backpacks. 

But the main quirk of @meta1coin might be that it continues to update daily—two months after the Securities and Exchange Commission froze the company’s assets, one month after a Texas district court held the board members in contempt, and just weeks after a judge issued warrants for two members’ arrest, over running what the SEC claims is a $9 million scam involving a coin “backed by nothing.”

On its Instagram page, Meta 1 Coin describes itself as a “Coin for Humanity / Making History / Liquidity of Gold.” It is listed as a “Local Business.” The local business emerged in April of 2018, from two Boca Raton residents named Robert Dunlap and Nicole Bowdler. Dunlap, according to court documents, served as the “architect” of the coin and its “Executive Trustee and Global Visionary.” Bowdler, the YouTube mystic who calls herself “an Earth Angel incarnated to help humanity” and now runs an online school for psychics, came on board as the coin’s “Trustee and Art Acquisitions & Forensics Director of Business Development.” 

Read more at The Daily Beast.