"Bitcoin Jesus" and the founder Bitcoin.com Roger Vera was detained in Spain on charges of tax fraud by the US Department of Justice.
Authorities intend to have him extradited to the United States, where he is charged with mail fraud, tax evasion and filing false returns.
According to a statement from law enforcement, Ver allegedly hid possession of the first cryptocurrency from the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which caused losses in the amount of $48 million.
In June 2017, two of the accused's companies owned approximately 70,000 BTC, which he later appropriated, hiding information from an accountant, and "sold tens of thousands of them on cryptocurrency exchanges for about $240 million."
"Despite the fact that Ver was not a U.S. citizen at the time, he was still legally required to report to the IRS and pay taxes on certain income, including dividends from MemoryDealers and Agilestar, which were American corporations," the Justice Department said in its materials.
The entrepreneur also used legal services to prepare and file false tax returns that underestimated the value of his two companies.
Ver resided in Santa Clara, California, but renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014 after receiving a St. Kitts and Nevis passport in the Caribbean.
Earlier, Charles O. Parks III, a resident of Nebraska (USA), also known as CP3O, was accused of stealing $3.5 million from cloud computing services in order to mine cryptocurrencies.
Recall that on April 30, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison for money laundering and other illegal activities.