Few and Far Founder Charged with Fraud a Year After Own Audit Was Ignored

The indictment, which Sandmark reviewed directly, describes something closer to a boardroom coup than a straightforward embezzlement, and a fundraising structure that let one man override every internal check placed on him.

According to the indictment, Tarsha, 34, raised more than $10mn from at least 67 investors beginning in February 2022, before Few and Far even formally existed, selling rights to 95mn FAR tokens through Simple Agreements for Future Tokens, or SAFTs, a fundraising instrument that lets a startup collect money against a token that doesn't exist yet. The pitch deck, per the indictment, promised a decentralized NFT marketplace on the NEAR blockchain, a layer-1 network aimed at consumer-facing apps, with FAR holders eventually able to stake the token for annual returns of up to 427%. It also listed a "Few and Far Team", a development lead, a head of operations, a head of partnerships, whom prosecutors say never worked for or were contracted by the company at all. Tarsha, the indictment states, held all of Few and Far's equity through a Panamanian entity; his two co-founders held titles and nothing else.

The treasury coup

Investor funds went into a single wallet Tarsha alone controlled, and prosecutors say he began siphoning them almost immediately: gambling at an online casino, buying speculative crypto for his own accounts, and awarding himself and one co-founder $360,000 salaries within weeks, on top of two secret bonus rounds totaling $1.2mn within two months of founding the company. According to the indictment, he told that co-founder in writing he wanted to keep the bonuses "closer to the vest" because their third co-founder would "freak [] out."

In May 2022, under pressure for more transparency, Tarsha agreed to move the treasury into a multi-signature wallet requiring two of three co-founders' approval, gwo oa safeguard that, per the indictment, briefly worked. It didn't survive contact with an actual audit. Prosecutors say that in June 2023, the company's operations director and the third co-founder uncovered the gambling and the hidden bonuses, that one co-founder returned his $600k share, and that Tarsha refused to return his and within days was removed as a signatory.

He didn't accept that, prosecutors allege. Within two weeks, according to the indictment, Tarsha unilaterally fired the operations director and the co-founder who'd exposed him, both signatories on the wallet, threatened the third co-founder with legal action, and paid two of them enough to hand the wallet back. The same week, prosecutors say, he sent investors a letter admitting to the bonuses but describing them falsely as "performance-based" and denying any other wrongdoing, while privately telling his then-fiancée that "once we get ahold of the treasury we'll have more fun with them," followed days later by plans to "take in $200k" to split between them, then a link to a $350k yacht.

Why SAFTs keep producing this story

Few and Far's multi-signature requirement is the detail that makes this case worth reading past the headline. It was a real safeguard, imposed by co-founders who suspected something was wrong, and on the government's account it worked exactly once before Tarsha allegedly fired his way out of it. Nothing in a SAFT-funded startup's structure, no board he doesn't control, no external regulator watching in real time, no audited financials outside investors, would have stopped a founder who holds all the equity from doing that, if the allegations hold up. It's a fundraising-side version of a failure mode Sandmark has tracked on the governance side: in BonkDAO's case, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governed by token-holder votes combined with  low voter turnout, rather than a broken contract, let an attacker seize a dormant protocol's treasury. Here, the vulnerability wasn't apathy but concentration: one person held every card that mattered, and used it the moment his oversight became inconvenient.

The exit

Back in control, prosecutors say, Tarsha fired the rest of Few and Far's staff, kept one engineer, and directed him to make the marketplace look active rather than build it, telling him the "main goal" of what was displayed on the site was "optics." Prosecutors say Tarsha described the eventual token launch as a legal necessity rather than a milestone, needed because regulators "were watching him," and called the whole affair "just playing a game" with investors who "do not understand crypto." When the engineer suggested FAR might actually gain value, Tarsha's alleged reply was "that would be hilarious."

FAR finally launched in May 2024, more than two years after the fundraising began, on a single exchange not legally available to the US investors who'd funded it. It opened at around $0.13, fell more than 99% within a year, and was delisted for lack of value. Few and Far's website no longer operates.

What's next

Tarsha, of Miami, was arrested on 6 Jun and faces up to 20 years in prison on each of two counts - securities fraud and wire fraud - if convicted, though any actual sentence would be set by the court following a conviction. The case has been assigned to US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who presided over Sam Bankman-Fried's trial and sentencing. It is one of several crypto-fraud cases SDNY prosecutors have pursued this year, including a May indictment of a North Korean defector accused of $11mn in crypto fraud.

Tarsha denies the allegations. In a statement given to Decrypt, his attorneys, Evan Barr and Kaela Dahan of Reed Smith, argued prosecutors are "rewriting a failed business venture as a criminal fraud case through hindsight," and that Few and Far was a real startup that collapsed alongside the rest of the NFT market rather than a scheme. Sandmark has contacted Barr and Dahan directly and will update this article with any further response.

The charges are allegations, and Tarsha is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.