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A key sponsor of Tommy Robinson’s large far-right ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally in central London is a convicted fraudster alleged to be behind two cryptocurrency scandals – so-called ‘rug-pulls’.
Rug-pulls are schemes in which the owner of a cryptocurrency inflates the value by hyping up the currency’s potential, only to pull the rug by cashing out their coins for a profit, causing the value to plummet and leaving everyone else with worthless tokens.
The far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, otherwise known as ‘Tommy Robinson’ recently gathered between 110,000 and 150,000 people on the streets of London for the ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally on September 13th. The rally featured speakers from far-right movements around the world, including far-right billionaire Elon Musk and the French politician Eric Zemmour, whose party Reconquest is considered more extreme than Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
Robinson’s rally was “sponsored” by two cryptocurrency firms, Athena Bitcoin Global and Just FOMO, as well as V Social, a social network promoting “free speech” itself owned Just FOMO’s director, and Advance UK, Ben Habib’s right-wing split from Reform UK.
Byline Times can reveal that Ashley Ward, the owner of Just FOMO, is a convicted fraudster alleged to be behind two so-called cryptocurrency rug pulls.
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Ward appears to have been previously involved in scams operating under his birth name Ashley Keable in his hometown of Leicester, before his foray into crypto.
Various website bios including a Tumblr blog, a Flickr account, and a profile on the website Stage 32 suggest Keable was working as a filmmaker. The websites have photos of Ward under the name Ashley Keable.
In an interview promoting his other (seemingly dormant) cryptocurrency Roo Coin, Keable claimed that he had previously been a filmmaker. On Companies House, he is listed as the owner of Film Peeps Media Group a video production and web services company that dissolved in 2021, and as the owner of Blighty Media, a creative agency which dissolved in 2014.
Keable had previously been jailed for 12 months after admitting to 15 eBay frauds involving jewellery and digital cameras. In 2010, Judge Simon Hammond told Keable: “It was a carefully worked-out scam and carefully planned – a serious form of confidence trick.”
In 2012, the Leicester Mercury reported that Keable had been convicted for the second time of fraud after scamming a professional photographer out of £1,800 by advertising a camera on eBay that he did not have.
Operating under his new name Ashley Ward and the username Toshi, he launched crypto firm FOMO Network in 2024 and built hype for the project on Discord and Telegram, while people invested in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and the FOMO cryptocurrency behind it.
The process of building hype for the currency also involved sponsoring a Tommy Robinson protest on 1st June 2024, with Ward/Keable (as we shall refer to him from now on) bragging on Telegram that he had access to “the biggest names in politics”. Footage of the 1st June protest shows Robinson speaking in Parliament Square on a stage bearing the Just FOMO logo on either side.
But on 10th July last year, the value of FOMO crashed as liquidity was withdrawn from the currency in a move that the site Holy Coins described as a suspected rug pull.
Messages in the FOMO network’s Discord and Telegram channels show Ward/Keable spending several months reassuring investors in FOMO that a relaunch would soon come, or that they would get their money back via “airdrops” – dropping new coins into the crypto wallets of customers – before claiming in December 2024 that the money was lost in a hack on Gempad, the platform in which the FOMO liquidity was allegedly stored.
However, Ethereum receipts show that on 10 July, 2024, the crypto tokens were pulled from Gempad and sold for 157 Ethereum, worth around £450,000 at the time.
Paul Sibenik, an investigator at Cryptoforensic Investigators told Byline Times that what happened with the FOMO currency is consistent with the pattern of a rug pull, and that the claim that the liquidity was lost when the Gempad contract was hacked in December “makes no sense to me”.
He added that tokens went to the FOMO coin deployer wallet in June and the wallet’s activity; sending and receiving multiple transactions after the liquidity withdrawal is not indicative of a compromised wallet.
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Ward/Keable has also been accused of being behind the rug pull of another cryptocurrency he launched in 2021 called Roo Coin. In an interview with New To the Street, he said that he wanted to make crypto more accessible for “those that aren’t necessarily the most tech-savvy” and that Roo Coin, which he co-founded, would generate funds for charities.
In the interview, Ward/Keable claimed that he had got interested in crypto after a career as a filmmaker and there “were a lot of scams and unscrupulous projects that were on the way and I started educating people as to what to look out for, how to avoid these kinds of things, and from there Roo Coin was born really.”
A subreddit called Roo Coin Refunds was launched in August 2021 by investors in Roo Coin trying to get their money back. One poster on the subreddit said that he invested in Roo Coin after seeing a well-made advertisement with a kangaroo which “convinced [him] it was legit”. He told Byline Times that he “dropped a few hundred bucks” into Roo Coin before the rug pull and despite Ward/Keable’s promises of a refund, received nothing back.
Ward/Keable is a long-time associate of Tommy Robinson. A photo tweeted by former UKIP leader Gerard Batten which was featured in a Telegraph article shows Ward/Keable sat next to Daniel Thomas, a far-right activist, Tommy Robinson’s bodyguard and convicted kidnapper, at a meeting planning the UKIP Brexit Betrayal demonstration which took place in 2018. Robinson is also pictured, sat on the other side of Thomas, and was advising UKIP at the time.
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Robinson looks to be increasingly involved in the world of cryptocurrency. Last month cryptocurrency podcaster Peter McCormack received backlash after hosting Robinson on his podcast. Robinson also used the Unite the Kingdom march to promote his own coin UTKcoin, which he claims supports the Unite the Kingdom movement.
Concerns have also been raised by another of the cryptocurrency sponsors on Robinson’s march Athena Bitcoin. Athena Bitcoin, an American firm that operates kiosks that allow users to convert cash into bitcoin, is currently being sued in the District of Columbia, with Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb accusing the company of facilitating financial scams, illegally profiting from hidden fees and refusing to refund the victims of fraud.
In the lawsuit, Schwalb alleged that 93% of the company’s deposits in the district were as the result of scams, that the median age of victims was 71 and that the median amount lost per scam transaction was $8,000, with one victim losing a total of $98,000 in nineteen transactions.
Byline Times made repeated attempts to contact Ward/Keable, but did not receive a response. Athena Bitcoin did not respond to an attempt to contact them.
Just FOMO is the newly-incorporated company of which Ward/Keable is the sole director and owner, which is relaunching the FOMO cryptocurrency after the alleged rug pull last year.
Ward/Keable is also listed as a founding director of the FOMO Network, the firm which first launched the cryptocurrency before the alleged rug-pull. Companies House documents show he ceased to be a ‘person of significant control’ in November 2024 but remains a director.
Additional reporting by Max Colbert.
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