Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have indicted Taj Tarsha, the 34-year-old founder of NFT marketplace startup Few and Far Limited, on securities and wire fraud charges. The allegation is straightforward: he diverted more than $10 million raised from investors into online gambling, speculative crypto trades, a Miami condominium loan, and his side career as a DJ.
The indictment was announced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. According to the DOJ press release, Tarsha ran the scheme from at least February 2022 through December 2024. He collected money from at least 67 investors who purchased Simple Agreements for Future Tokens, or SAFTs. Those agreements entitled the buyers to 95 million FAR tokens once the marketplace launched.
Each fraud count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. Tarsha was arrested June 6, 2026. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan. He is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
“As alleged, Taj Tarsha raised millions of dollars from investors by promising that their investments would be used to build a marketplace for non-fungible tokens, but he instead breached their trust by stealing those funds for his own personal benefit,” said Sean S. Buckley, Deputy United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in the release. “Investors are entitled to the truth when choosing to make an investment, and this Office and our law enforcement partners will hold business leaders responsible when they lie for their own gain.”
James C. Barnacle, Jr., the FBI’s Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Field Office, put it more bluntly: “Taj Tarsha is alleged to have concealed fraudulent conduct behind his crypto startup, using investor funds for personal benefit.”
What the record shows
Tarsha drew a salary from Few and Far that he himself later called “unreasonable” for a company with no working product and, as the government put it, “zero revenue.” That alone would raise eyebrows. The indictment goes further. He also collected nearly $1 million through two bonuses tied to claims of hitting “predetermined FAR token presales targets,” bonuses he concealed from investors and from a company co-founder alike, according to the DOJ.
The scheme began to unravel in June 2023. An internal audit at Few and Far surfaced the misappropriated funds. Tarsha did not come clean. Instead, prosecutors allege, he told investors the bonus payments were tied to legitimate presale milestones and that the company still needed their capital to pursue its mission. By that point he had fired nearly all of Few and Far’s staff. A single contractor remained, performing work that “merely created the appearance of continued development.”
He kept spending investor money on personal expenses for roughly another year. The FAR token eventually launched in May 2024, two years after the SAFT sales began. The government describes it as “effectively worthless.” It soon stopped trading altogether. That gap tells the story. A two-year fundraising runway produced a token that died almost on arrival. The marketplace investors were told they were funding never materialized into a functioning product, prosecutors allege, while the man running it kept collecting.
The case falls to the SDNY’s Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force, with Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael S. DiBattista handling the prosecution. This is the same unit that has pursued a string of token-sale fraud cases as SAFT and presale structures, largely unregistered as securities offerings, became a common on-ramp for NFT and crypto startups during the 2021-2022 boom. Buckley’s statement frames the case as an example the office intends to keep making. That signal matters. Prosecutors appear to view Few and Far as part of a pattern rather than an isolated incident, though the release names no related pending cases.
Coverage of the indictment first surfaced via Decrypt and The Block, both citing the same DOJ materials.
What isn’t yet on the record
The DOJ release does not specify a docket number. It does not say whether any of the $10 million has been recovered, nor whether prosecutors are seeking asset forfeiture. No defense statement appears in the government’s release. It is not clear whether Few and Far still exists in any operating form. Tarsha’s next scheduled court date has not been made public.
