Bitconned Subject Robert Farkas Served Prison Time For Fraud

Nearly two years after Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King, Netflix has dropped another documentary about cryptocurrency — and if you’re a fan of scam stories, you’ve probably already breezed through it. Bitconned revisits the short-lived saga of Centra Tech, a startup that regaled investors (more than $32 million worth) with descriptions of a product that would revolutionize how people spend their crypto.

However, as Bitconned shows, Centra Tech was built on a series of misrepresentations, from a fake CEO to partnerships and technology that simply didn’t exist.

Less than a year after Centra Tech’s debut, its three co-founders — Sohrab Sharma, Raymond Trapani, and Robert Farkas — would face fraud charges for their respective roles in the company. However, not all of their sentences were equal.

Here’s where Robert Farkas is today, and what he thinks about how everything went down.

Robert Farkas’ Role In Centra Tech

According to Bitconned, Farkas was the last co-founder on the Centra Tech team. While Trapani says in the documentary that Farkas was “definitely not qualified to be CFO,” he adds that Centra Tech needed someone to keep up with growing online interest in the company.

“I was doing conferences, setting up booths, getting the community involved,” Farkas says in the doc. “It felt like we were changing the world.”

“Double Scam”

In Bitconned, Farkas explains that Centra Tech sought legal counsel from a purported attorney named Eric Pope — who was actually a college student.

“All the emails he sent us with the [Securities and Exchange Commission] were fake. Everything was a lie,” Farkas recalls in the documentary.

He Served Time

Indeed, Centra Tech didn’t have the SEC’s approval. Farkas and Sharma were the first to be charged in April 2018, with Trapani following weeks later. According to the agency, “Farkas made flight reservations to leave the country, but was arrested before he was able to board his flight.”

Farkas was sentenced to a year in prison after pleading guilty to “conspiring to commit securities fraud and wire fraud” in 2020, per the United States Attorney’s Office.

In addition to the Centra Tech team being punished, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and DJ Khaled paid penalties for their role in promoting the company without disclosing payments from it.

Now that Farkas is out of prison, he was able to take part in telling Centra Tech’s story for Bitconned — and he’s displeased that Trapani made out with no jail time at all. After the judge’s statement referred to Trapani’s cooperation as “extraordinary,” Farkas questioned the government’s “audacity” to praise his former colleague as “a good guy.”