Beautiful Virgin Islands

Wednesday, Jul 08, 2026

Software guru John McAfee and his top cryptocurrency adviser charged with fraud and money laundering by US federal prosecutors

Software guru John McAfee and his top cryptocurrency adviser charged with fraud and money laundering by US federal prosecutors

Antivirus pioneer John McAfee has been charged with fraud and money laundering by prosecutors in New York. The businessman and one-time presidential candidate is accused of fraudulently promoting cryptocurrency on social media.

An indictment against McAfee was unsealed on Friday, and names both him and Jimmy Gale Watson – an adviser to McAfee – as defendants in a fraud and money laundering case. The pair are accused of using McAfee’s social media accounts to publicize various cryptocurrencies, inflating their value and allegedly netting McAfee more than $13 million. Another member of the McAfee team was allegedly tasked with laundering this money in a series of banking transactions.

“As alleged, McAfee and Watson used social media to perpetrate an age-old pump-and-dump scheme,” FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. said in a Justice Department press release, referring to the practice of buying assets cheaply, before hyping up their value and selling them at this new, artificial price.

McAfee has long considered himself an outlaw, and spent much of the last several years living on a yacht in the Caribbean, admittedly on the run from US tax authorities. He turned up in Spain last September and was arrested there the following month, awaiting extradition to the US to face tax evasion charges, as well as the latest fraud and money laundering accusations.

McAfee has continued to tweet his musings and observations from behind bars, while his wife, Janice McAfee, last month put out a message looking for American lawyers, preferably with a “sound understanding of cryptocurrency.”


If convicted on all of the latest counts, McAfee could face up to 60 years in prison, on top of whatever sentence he could also receive for tax evasion.



Newsletter

Related Articles

Beautiful Virgin Islands
0:00
0:00
Close
Political Turmoil and Rising Costs
Anthropic Reengineers Agentic Architecture to Shift Autonomous Workplace Automation to the Cloud
Logic Flaw in Windows 11 Permission Architecture Silently Consumes Hundreds of Gigabytes of Local Storage
Apple Advances Late-Stage Operating Systems with Fourth Beta Deployments
Global Crisis Alert: Escalating Middle East Tensions and UK Political Upheaval
Deep Purple Has Released Its Best Album in Decades
Microsoft Lays Off 4,800 Employees and Xbox Suffers the Hardest Blow
Morocco and France Advance as 2026 FIFA World Cup Enters Quarterfinals.
Historic 2026 Tour de France Opens in Barcelona With Revamped Team Time Trial.
Global Mergers and Acquisitions Approach $4 Trillion Defying Geopolitical Tumult.
Negotiators Advance 20-Point Framework for Gaza Ceasefire and Demilitarization.
OECD Warns Middle East Conflict Will Depress Global Economic Growth.
Ukrainian Drones Strike Major Oil Terminal in St. Petersburg.
World Meteorological Organization Issues Urgent Alert Over Rapidly Intensifying El Niño.
United States Commemorates 250th Anniversary With Diplomatic Summits and Global Flotilla.
Iran Begins Days-Long Funeral for Supreme Leader Khamenei Amid Strait of Hormuz Standoff.
Technology giant reports surging carbon emissions driven by artificial intelligence infrastructure demands.
Artificial intelligence adoption accelerates workforce reductions across the technology and financial sectors.
Global technology and financial conglomerates collaborate to launch a new stablecoin standard.
United States regulators lift export restrictions on a major frontier artificial intelligence model.
Luxury bags take over the World Cup: style, status symbol, or just showing off?
×