Director of ‘47 Ronin’ who gambled Netflix funds on crypto gets 30 months
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- Netflix gave Rinsch $44 million initially for sci-fi show 'White Horse' (later renamed 'Conquest'), then wired an additional $11 million in March 2020 — of which Rinsch used $10.5 million to trade stock options, losing roughly half within weeks before moving more than $4 million to crypto exchange Kraken.
- The Dogecoin bet went the other way: Rinsch liquidated in May 2021 for approximately $27 million in profit, per an account statement seen by The New York Times.
- The DOGE windfall fueled roughly $10 million in personal spending per the indictment: $2.4 million on five Rolls-Royces and a Ferrari, $3.8 million on furniture and antiques, $1.8 million on credit card bills, $1 million on lawyers to sue Netflix, and $652,000 on watches and clothing.
- The sci-fi series was never finished and the production funds were never returned, despite the Dogecoin profit that would have covered completion costs many times over.
- Prosecutors sought a five-year sentence in a mid-June memo; the defense cited mental health issues and submitted a character letter from actor Keanu Reeves, Rinsch's collaborator on '47 Ronin.'
- Rinsch was convicted of one count each of wire fraud and money laundering plus five counts of making monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity, and was sentenced to 30 months in prison, three years of supervised release, $11 million in forfeiture, and $700 in mandatory special assessments.
Why it matters: Rinsch turned $4 million into $27 million on Dogecoin and still got 30 months plus $11 million in forfeiture — because the crime wasn't the trade, it was treating Netflix's $55 million production budget as a personal slush fund and never delivering the show. The studio is out both the cash and the series, and external producers now see a concrete prison precedent for fund misuse.
