Criminal duo charged for $22M rug-pulled NFT schemes like ‘Vault of Gems’

Two men have been charged with what some call the “largest NFT scheme prosecuted to date.”

“So you have deleted the chat channels in Discord, and not a single project member is around anymore. At least have the balls to come out and say that you have failed to deliver the roadmap instead of slithering off, leaving 1.9k token owners holding the bag. Slimey and then some.”

This is a comment from one X user who may have invested in an NFT project created by two men who swindled inventors out of $22 million.

Gabriel Hay, 23, of Beverly Hills, and Gavin Mayo, 23, of Thousand Oaks, persuaded investors to invest millions in their NFT business, only to later abandon the project and keep the funds for themselves.

If found guilty, the criminal duo could face upwards of 65 years in prison.

NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are unique digital tokens representing ownership of an asset like a piece of art. They are then recorded on the blockchain, a system for recording cryptocurrency transactions, which shows a person's ownership of the digital asset.

According to court documents, Hay and Mayo sponsored several different projects relating to digital assets and NFTs. The pair promoted their projects on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter).

One NFT project, Vault of Gems, received attention from the likes of American football champion Antonio Brown and other prominent cryptocurrency community members, such as Raichu, who helped promote it.

However, according to internet sleuth ZachXBT, the Vault of Gem’s crew left the project with over $1 million of investors' money just weeks after its launch.

The project, which started sometime in 2021, was promoted by Hay and Mayo as the “first NFT project to be pegged to a hard asset,” meaning that the project would be tied to something physical, presumably gems or jewelry.

But this never came to fruition, as the project was then supposedly rug-pulled, and the creators fled with millions.

However, Vault of Gems wasn’t the only project that was later abandoned. Court documents state that Hay and Mayo created Faceless, Sinful Souls, Clout Coin, Dirty Dogs, Uncovered, MoonPortal, Squiggles, and Roost Coin.

The pair supposedly went to great lengths to hide their involvement in these schemes. They claimed that other people were the heads of the projects when they weren’t and even harassed and intimidated people who exposed them.

A project manager on the ‘Faceless’ project allegedly exposed Hay and Mayo. After that, the pair went on a harassment campaign against the person, sending them and their family messages with the intent to intimidate them.