On a scorching July day in Dubai, Sam Lee was inside a climate-controlled wine bar, sipping a glass of chilled red, looking untouchable. Near the beginning of the year, US authorities announced that they’d charged Lee in absentia with conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud. They alleged that, as the co-founder of a company called HyperVerse, he’d orchestrated a cryptocurrency scam that bilked investors around the world for almost $2 billion. HyperVerse had promised returns as high as 1% a day via cutting-edge blockchain-based strategies, but according to the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, it was just an old-fashioned Ponzi scheme.

In a series of interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek, Lee, an Australian citizen who’s been living and working in Dubai for the past several years, denied the allegations against him and said any misuse of HyperVerse funds must have been conducted by someone else. “Startups fail,” he said at the wine bar, playfully tilting his glass. “That’s just the nature of business.” Whenever he got a tough question, he paused for a prolonged beat, sometimes cocking a dark eyebrow. US officials had said they were working with counterparts in the United Arab Emirates to hand Lee a summons, but he wasn’t concerned with the US government’s wishes: “They have no evidence, so I don’t have to do anything.”