The sponsors of Messari Mainnet, a crypto conference in New York City, include a who’s who of crypto.
There are industry pillars like Coinbase, Circle and Ripple. There are up-and-comers like Pyth and Jito.
And then there’s Freedom Law School, which paid $40,000 to sponsor the conference, the founder, Peymon Mottahedeh, told DL News.
When attendees walked into the conference hall in Manhattan, the company’s booth greeted participants in all caps: “PAY NO CRYPTO TAXES EVER.”
Freedom Law School tells customers that they don’t have to pay federal income tax. If the US Internal Revenue Service does go after them for tax evasion, the company promises to protect them — for a fee.
For a single taxpayer with a salary of $100,000, it costs approximately $4,500 a year to opt into the “Restore Freedom Plan,” according to the business’s online estimator.
Mahesh Sashital, a crypto startup founder at the conference, raised his eyebrows at Freedom Law School’s legal proclamations.
“I would never really want to be associated with something like this,” he told DL News.
Messari, though, didn’t seem to mind. Freedom Law School’s logo was on their website for the conference. It was plastered across signage at the conference venue. And Peymon Mottahedeh, founder of the business, spoke on the conference floor on Monday about how to not pay taxes.
His presentation was part of his sponsorship package, Eric Turner, the CEO of Messari, told DL News. He declined to comment on the details of the agreement, including the sponsorship amount.
“Messari works with a range of sponsors solving various problems that crypto users face,” Turner told DL News. “Rather than trying to be arbiters of solutions, our goal is to create conversations between people in the industry.”
“If people want to remain ignorant and not look at things with an open mind, that’s their problem,” Mottahedeh, the founder, told DL News.
‘Fear not’
Mottahedeh claims on his website that he hasn’t paid federal income taxes since 1993.
In a pamphlet he handed out to attendees at Messari’s conference, he argued that “it has been proven” that the only people required to pay federal income taxes are residents of Washington and federal workers in the nation’s capital.
But Mottahedeh hasn’t had much success in court.
In 2016, the Department of Justice successfully convicted Richard Grant, a member of Mottahedeh’s Freedom Law School, for tax evasion. Grant was sentenced to 33 months in prison.
“Instead of using the lawyer we PLEADED with Richard to get, he hired his own lawyer, ignoring our suggestions,” read an entry on Freedom Law School’s website.
And, in 2023, an appeals court reaffirmed a tax court’s decision that Mottahedeh had evaded paying taxes from 2001 to 2006.
“The court of appeals did not address anything I said,” Mottahedeh told DL News. “The briefs were voluminous.”
However, the Freedom Law School won’t let the law or his mortality get in the way of his mission to spread the gospel of tax evasion.
“Fear not!” reads a response to a frequently asked question on his website about “What Happens if Peymon Dies?”
The Freedom Law School founder has been passing along his secrets of tax evasion to “passionate activists,” it continued. “You will not be stuck when Peymon passes away.”
Ben Weiss is a Dubai Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at bweiss@dlnews.com.
(Disclosure: Llama Corp, the parent of DL News, provides some of the same services of Messari.)
