Controversial antivirus software entrepreneur John McAfee has claimed that Dogecoin was part of new charges brought against him by the United States Department of Justice. In a Sunday tweet, McAfee claimed that DOGE was one of several cryptocurrencies that he endorsed as part of his “coin of the day” tweets about four years ago. “For a few days in 2017, I chose coins I believed had value,” McAfee stated regarding his choice of cryptocurrencies. The entrepreneur was earlier indicted on several charges of fraud concerning cryptocurrencies.
McAfee called Doge “coin of the week “four years ago.
The controversial entrepreneur noted that Dogecoin price has increased 1,000% since he “chose it,” hinting that thus his DOGE tweets should not be included in the DoJ’s latest “pump-and-dump” charges. McAfee also emphasized that Dogecoin is “now being touted years later” by Tesla CEO Elon Musk. McAfee apparently referred to his 2018 tweet composing a short statement: “Coin of the week: DOGE.” On the day of McAfee’s tweet, Jan. 8, 2018, DOGE was trading at around $0.014, subsequently dropping to $0.007 in two weeks, according to data from CoinGecko.
McAfee had promoted several other cryptocurrencies.
Dogecoin was just one of the many cryptocurrencies that McAfee promoted on Twitter in late 2017 and early 2018 alongside coins like Electroneum (ETN), Burst (BURST), Digibyte (DGB), Reddcoin (RDD), Humaniq (HMQ), Factom (FCT), and others. As previously reported by Cointelegraph, McAfee himself disclosed that he had a whole team for promoting initial coin offerings and other crypto projects on his official Twitter page, offering one promo tweet at a price of $105,000. As reported earlier, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the FBI unsealed the indictment charging John McAfee and his associate Jimmy Watson with several securities fraud.
