Remember Ryan Kennedy, AKA Alex Green? He’s the former Moolah chief who got arrested in the UK last year on charges of stealing circa $1.8 million worth of bitcoin. Well, he’s back in custody on a different charge altogether. Local media in the UK, specifically the town of Bristol, reported that Kennedy has just been arrested on rape and sexual assault charges.
The Bristol Post documented a court appearance that took place on February 1, 2016, at which Kennedy was accused of fourteen total charges; among them rape, sexual activity without consent and various other sexual assault related charges.
We don’t know yet how the case will play out, and obviously are not n a position to comment on the likelihood of his guilt, but we know the charges cover the period 2007-2015, and that Kennedy has plead not guilty to all of them. We also know there are five separate women involved, each of which has accused him of rape at least once.
Information is pretty thin on the ground at the moment, but we’ll stay on top of the story and bring you any developments as they happen. As things stand, he’s in custody, and it looks as though he will stay there until litigation commences – scheduled for a May start.
For those readers not familiar with Ryan Kennedy, he is commonly referred to as the man who killed dogecoin. A few years back he started handing out large dogecoin tips to seemingly random users on Reddit, and used the reputation this errant him to raise the money to expand and maintain an exchange Kennedy was running called Moolah.
After a successful period, he set out to buy another exchange – MintPal – which was reelig from a security breach, with the (stated) goal of improving the platform’s security and expanding its userbase. He raised more money to do so, and took a 35% stake in MintPal through his company Moolah. They set about the task, but the exchange failed miserably, dogged by technical issues and shut down after a matter of days’ post-relaunch.
Then things got bad. People started reporting that they couldn’t withdraw capital, rumors spread that Kennedy (at that time he was going by the pseudonym Alex Green) was not who he said he was, and Syscoin, an altcoin organization that at one time held up to $200,000 with the exchange, started litigation for recovery.
Shortly after, Green came out as being Kennedy, shut down the exchange, declared Moolah bankrupt and – essentially – disappeared. For a while he claimed he was processing withdrawals (we’ve never seen any evidence of this so we can’t really comment on the validity of these claims), but then in February last year, and as mentioned, UK authorities arrested him on charges related to the Syscoin funds.
What will happen now is unclear. He’s been quiet on the Syscoin charges, and whether they will take a back seat as the litigation kicks off in the sexual assault charges remains to be seen. Chances are we won’t be seeing him around the crypto space for a while, however.
As ever, we’ll keep you updated as news rolls in. Stay tuned.
