Roger Ver, the ‘Bitcoin Jesus,’ Faces Extradition to the U.S. on Tax-Evasion Charges

To his followers, Roger Ver is known as Bitcoin Jesus, a charismatic advocate of the cryptocurrency that is once again captivating investors with record-breaking gains.

Roger Ver, a prominent early crypto investor and advocate, is facing a new kind of legal battle: US prosecutors charged him with evading more than $48 million in taxes for selling $240 million in tokens.

The case, filed this year, is the first to focus solely on tax fraud and digital-asset sales. Prosecutors typically tack on tax charges to crypto cases for crimes like money laundering, ransomware attacks and investor scams.

Ver, 45, is awaiting a Spanish judge’s decision on whether he must be extradited to America after his April arrest in Barcelona while attending a crypto conference. The US expatriate spent a month in jail before getting out on bail and moving to Mallorca. An outspoken critic of the US government, he said he’s being persecuted by prosecutors.

“They don’t like me, and they don’t like my political views, and they just came at me every which way,” Ver told Bloomberg News in an exclusive interview in late October.

Ver said the Justice Department has ignored evidence that helps his defense and refutes a central premise by prosecutors – that he intended to cheat the IRS. Rather, he said, he relied on professionals who advised him when IRS policy on taxing crypto sales was unsettled.

“I instructed all my tax attorneys and preparers, ‘We need to do everything perfectly because I don’t want any problem with the IRS at all,”’ Ver said. “That was their instructions the whole time.”

A Justice Department representative declined to comment.

The seeds of Ver’s legal peril lay in his success as an early crypto investor — long before the latest Bitcoin rally fueled by Donald Trump’s US presidential win. They center on his representations to the IRS and the agency’s reconstruction of his holdings.

Ver grew up in Silicon Valley, founding a computer company called MemoryDealers at the precocious age of 19. He also engaged in tax protests and ran for California’s legislature at 21 as a libertarian.

In 2001, he pleaded guilty to dealing explosives without a license. (Ver says he simply sold firecrackers on eBay.) He served 10 months in prison, which hardened his attitude toward the US government. He left America in 2006, moving to Japan. He focused on building MemoryDealers and another firm, Agilestar, which sold optical transceivers.

When crypto began, he embraced its promise for transferring wealth without government interference. He started buying Bitcoin in 2011 for less than $1, touting it at barbecues, parties, and everywhere else. Intense and fast talking, he spread the vision of using crypto to buy a sandwich or even a car. When Bitcoin hit it big, Ver touted its potential from conference stages.

He co-founded Blockchain.com, a crypto company once valued at $14 billion, and was an early investor in payment processor BitPay and digital-asset firm Ripple. When the Bitcoin network underwent a software upgrade he opposed in 2017, Ver broke with the community, switching to a split-off called Bitcoin Cash. He said his current holdings include Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether and Zeno.

Despite his notoriety, Ver decided in 2014 to renounce his US citizenship, later becoming a citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis. US citizens who expatriate and are worth more than $2 million must report their worldwide assets to the IRS, and pay an exit tax based on their asset sales.

As he planned to expatriate, prosecutors allege, Ver hid the number and value of Bitcoin he owned and controlled personally and through MemoryDealers and Agilestar, his California-based companies.

The IRS used blockchain analysis to determine that by early 2014, Ver and his companies owned about 131,000 Bitcoin trading between $782 and $960, according to the indictment — more than he reported in tax filings. He’s accused of tax evasion, wire fraud, and filing a false tax return.

Ver worked with a law firm and appraisers on the exit tax, but gave them false or misleading information about his Bitcoin holdings, and an exit tax return filed in 2016 failed to report the Bitcoin he owned personally and underreported the value of his companies, prosecutors charge.

The indictment also alleges Ver “fraudulently misrepresented and concealed” from the IRS the crypto that his companies sold in 2017 for about $240 million.

Ver disputes this characterization, but declined to discuss the indictment further or elaborate on his crypto holdings with Bloomberg.

A website, freerogernow.org, is linked to Ver’s personal website and encourages supporters to sign an open letter calling on the US government to end his “unjust