The U.S. Department of Justice has charged two California men in Los Angeles federal court with defrauding investors of more than $22 million in the largest non-fungible tokens scheme it has ever prosecuted.

Gabriel Hay, 23 and Gavin Mayo, 23, sponsored several NFT and other digital asset projects and undertook promotional activities supporting those projects from May 2021 to May 2024, according to the complaint. NFTs are assets like pieces of art, digital content, or video that have been tokenized via blockchain, and can be traded and exchanged for money and cryptocurrencies.