A freelance journalist who used to do regular work with Newsweek, The Washington Post and The New York Times was forced to flee his career after he was caught involved in a number of scams. A new federal accusation says the journalist came into the rich world of cryptocurrency in an attempt to walk away with $3.5 million worth of Bitcoin.

Jerry Ji Guo has worked for a lot of big names for his age of 31. In 2010, he had been working for the newspapers, mentioned above when his career was cut short after being caught using his details to scam free merchandise and international travel from ersatz reporting subjects. Following this, Guo bounced back into New York’s ‘Silicon Alley’ which is a tech startup community which scored YCombinator seed funding for a group dating service called Grouper and lasted around eight months.

Since this time, we can now look at his LinkedIn profile and see that the Chinese-American graduate from Yale has been the owner and head chef of a burger bar in Beijing as well as founding a growth hacking marketing company in Atlanta. In 2017 he finally landed in the field in which seemed natural to him, cryptocurrency. He launched a $2 million ICO for a content sharing platform he claimed had partnerships in place with The Voice and American Idol.

Guo is now on a different path for the potential of up to 20 years. On the 9th November, FBI agents in Puerto Rico arrested the self-described serial blockchain entrepreneur on wire fraud charges for allegedly stealing around $3.5 million worth in cryptocurrency from startups which had initially hired him as a consultant.

Last week, a federal judge in San Juan ordered Guo’s transfer to California in order to go face to face with the eight counts of incitements which carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison by statute and at least five years three months under federal sentencing guidelines.

As reported by the Daily Beast:

“At the centre of the case is Guo’s career in the fast money world of initial coin offerings. An ICO is a blockchain-based fundraising strategy in which a company drums up capital by minting and selling digital tokens directly to the public.”

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