‘Poof You’re a Millionaire’: Scammer Convinced Investors to Send Him $1.5 Million to Build Magic Money Making Bot

This article was produced and reported in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records.

A man was arrested for allegedly perpetrating a comically absurd cryptocurrency scam in which he convinced a series of investors to send him at least $1.5 million to build a bot that he essentially pitched as a zero risk, magic money making machine that would make investors instantly wealthy. The man seemingly never built this bot and instead spent much of this money on buying season tickets in a suite for the Denver Broncos, a new Jeep, and with a company called Atlantis Paradise Vacation, which runs the Paradise Island resort in the Bahamas. 

According to an FBI affidavit, a man named Robert Robb, who once spent two years in prison for defrauding millions of dollars from investors “by falsely stating Las Vegas-based casinos would be using his prototype gambling machine,” convinced a series of crypto investors to give him money to build a “Maximum Extractable Value cryptocurrency trading bot.” An MEV bot is an arbitrage scheme in which a bot trades cryptocurrency for what is supposed to be a guaranteed gain by exploiting inefficiencies in a crypto blockchain. There are examples of MEV bots working for a short period of time, but there is no indication in the affidavit that Robb’s would have worked or that he ever actually built anything. 

Already have an account? Sign in