McAfee claims DOGE price prediction to blame for latest US charges

Troubled antivirus software entrepreneur John McAfee has claimed that Dogecoin (DOGE) was part of new charges brought against him by the United States Department of Justice. In a Sunday tweet, McAfee pinpointed 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 famous 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 this tweet, Jan. 8, 2018, DOGE was trading at around $0.014, subsequently dropping to $0.007 in two weeks, according to data from CoinGecko. The coin did not retest the $0.014 price mark until Dogecoin started seeing substantial gains in late 2020 following Musk’s tweets.

Dogecoin was just one 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.

Already being detained on allegations of tax evasion, McAfee faced new fraud-related charges from the DoJ on March 5, 2021. The regulator wrote in a new action: “The defendants allegedly used McAfee’s Twitter account to publish messages to hundreds of thousands of his Twitter followers touting various cryptocurrencies through false and misleading statements to conceal their true, self-interested motives.”

As previously reported, Tesla CEO Musk has been subject of rumors about a potential investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for his alleged impact on DOGE price moves in late 2020 and early 2021. Following a series of Musk's DOGE-related tweets, Dogecoin price saw a parabolic surge in February, hitting an all-time high of around $0.08 on Feb. 8. DOGE subsequently saw a major sell-off following Musk urged major holders to sell off their holdings.