CryptoPunk Trader Faces Prison After Hiding $13M in NFT Profits from IRS
A Pennsylvania man who made millions flipping CryptoPunks NFTs is now facing prison time after admitting he misled the IRS about his earnings.
The man known as Waylon Wilcox reportedly failed to disclose nearly $13 million in profits made over two years of NFT trading.
Prosecutors say he knowingly filed false tax returns for both 2021 and 2022, significantly understating his income and dodging over $3 million in taxes combined.
In both filings, he denied engaging in any digital asset transactions despite making substantial gains from selling 97 CryptoPunk NFTs.
READ MORE: Is Bitcoin Quietly Positioning Itself to Replace the U.S. Dollar?
Authorities revealed that Wilcox reduced his 2021 tax bill by more than $2 million by underreporting roughly $8.5 million in income. He repeated the offense in 2022, hiding another $4.6 million and avoiding more than $1 million in taxes.
Wilcox pleaded guilty to two felony counts related to tax fraud and now faces up to six years behind bars, along with possible fines and supervised release. The exact sentence will be determined at a later date.
Federal investigators, led by the IRS’s criminal division, called the case part of a broader crackdown on hidden crypto wealth.
As NFT markets grow, officials stress that crypto profits are subject to the same rules as traditional income—and failure to report them won’t go unnoticed.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
