John McAfee, creator of the first commercial antivirus software, has a habit of tweeting about low value crypto currencies that subsequently jump in value. But the reasons for his tweets are now coming under greater scrutiny as a firm behind one of the cryto currencies tweeted about has denied McAfee’s explanation of the tweets.

For a while it was thought that McAfee might have been accumulating these lesser known crypto currencies before tweeting about them and then dumping them on the market as its price immediately rose in value — a pump and dump scheme.

After remaining silent about the tweets for some time McAfee announced that he was paid $105,000 per tweet, stating that ‘the cost per investor reached is $0.13’. This calmed some of the accusations that he was engaging in a pump and dump scheme.

However, that explanation has now been dismissed by Ripio, a company mentioned in one of McAfee’s promotional tweets. In an interview Ripio’s founders state that they never paid for the tweet, that they never contacted him or even knew that the tweet was coming.

When asked if they were happy about the tweet Ripio’s founders said “Well, I don’t know” and “He’s a very eccentric character”. Watch the video below, or click here to go to the moment the tweet is discussed.

Since then, McAfee has stated that he is ‘no longer charging for tweets’.

It seems highly unlikely that Ripio would ask McAfee to ‘pump’ their coin, given that it has over 150,000 users, a large team of developers in Buenos Aires’ financial district and backing from people such as venture capitalist Tim Draper.

The mystery over the real motives for McAfee’s promotional tweets, which Ripio claim are not what he says they are, only seems to be getting deeper.