The 24-year-old Breton, son of the former En Avant Guingamp Claude Michel, was arrested in New York. Accused of being the main organizer of a scam at 2.7 million euros, he filed a request for conditional release.
by Damien Leloup, Pierre Found and Louis Adam
Sunday, December 18, Aurélien Michel vibrated, from the stands of the Lusail stadium, where he attended the final of the Football World Cup, ideally placed to film the successful shot of Kylian Mbappé. The highlight of a dream stay in Qatar: big hotels, good restaurants, and “ten games including the final, the best match in my life”, he wrote on Instagram.
Three weeks later, on January 4, a radical change of atmosphere: when he got off the plane, at John F. Kennedy in New York, this 24 -year -old was arrested by the police. After a night in police custody, he is presented to a judge of the Federal Court of Brooklyn, who decides to keep in detention pending trial.
For the American authorities, Mr. Michel is the main brain of a scam in the NFT (non-fungible, non-Fungible tokens in English) well-established, which would have allowed him to siphon nearly $ 3 million (2 , 7 million euros) with gullible investors. According to the act of indictment , Aurélien Michel was the main administrator of the project “Mutant Ape Planet”, a series of virtual monkeys who was a plagiarism of the famous “mutant ape yacht club”, one of the most rated NFT collections in the world. The project promised the first investors of very numerous advantages and awards, and assured them that the value of their virtual images would explode thanks to a large online marketing campaign.
except that everything was false. After collecting several million dollars in cryptocurrencies, the creators of the project simply left with the cash register in February 2022 – a sweater rug (literally “shoot the carpet” in English), in the jargon of the cryptoactive middle. The project website as well as the Discord discussion server has been closed. Now unsaleable, the project’s NFT no longer has any value.
According to the documents published by the American justice, Aurélien Michel, alongside other unidentified people, would thus have underlined the equivalent of $ 2.9 million in cryptocurrency to the victims of the scam. The administrators of the project would also have stated on social networks that they initially did not intend to leave with investors’ money, but that “the community had become too toxic”. The investigators managed to link a telephone number and two email addresses belonging to Mr. Michel to the account on which all the cryptocurrencies of investors were transferred.
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