Right-wing influencers are shilling an app that purportedly lets people earn crypto for reporting sightings of undocumented immigrants. ICERAID, a “GovFi protocol that delegates intelligence gathering tasks to citizens,” has recently been promoted by the likes of conspiracy theorist and Trump confidante Laura Loomer, Proud Boy-turned-media personality Jacob Engels, and disgraced former Rep. Matt Gaetz.
“It’s like a citizen’s arrest, but with Wi-Fi,” Gaetz said on a recent episode of his One America News Network show. “Forget driving Uber or DoorDash for extra change. Snap a pic, save the day, and stack some digital cash while you’re doing it.”
ICERAID’s website describes it as a “GovFi” — government finance, a term coined by ICERAID founder Jason Meyers — protocol on Solana that “rewards citizens for capturing and uploading images of criminal illegal alien activity.” (To be clear, ICERAID has no connection to the government.) And ICERAID isn’t just soliciting images of suspected immigrants. “You can snap a picture of someone committing animal cruelty or homicide, kidnapping, terrorism — you see someone scraping a Tesla, that’s domestic terrorism,” Meyers said on an April 4th livestream. ICERAID then “gives” this data to law enforcement, according to Meyers.
Despite these lofty ambitions, the ICERAID app (which is actually a web form accessed via a crypto wallet) appears to be little more than promotion of a recently released meme coin of the same name — and some early investors tried to get their money back before the coin even launched.
Meyers — who was accused of misappropriating funds at an earlier workplace — told The Verge that ICERAID was released in January. ICERAID announced a “bounty” for “suspicious illegal alien activity” in New York City the following month. But the coin ostensibly used to pay out rewards to people who send in tips via the app didn’t drop until April. To access the reporting system, you have to download Phantom, a crypto wallet that carries Solana-based tokens. ICERAID then offers a form where you can upload images of alleged crimes-in-progress: illegal immigration, drug trafficking, kidnapping, “theft/larson,” burglary, homicide, terrorism, animal cruelty, and obstruction of justice. You’re asked whether you witnessed the activity in the image and recognize the location or suspects, and that’s all.
In an interview with Gaetz, Meyers said he’s “talking to certain people at DHS, local law enforcement, DEA, and various other police departments” about the app. “We use blockchain to crowdsource law enforcement and criminal and illegal activities,” Meyers said. “You upload a photo — which you have to take on location — and you get paid for each photo you upload.”
On ICERAID’s Telegram channel, Meyers clarified that the app gives “API access” to law enforcement. “They ultimately decide if they should respond to the data,” Meyers said in an emailed statement to The Verge. “The goal is cooperation, not official partnerships.”
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) already has a tipline, as does US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees legal immigration. ICE also has dozens of official partnerships with law enforcement agencies across the country.
Even if law enforcement agencies are accessing ICERAID’s data, it’s unlikely they’ll get anything useful out of it. ICERAID’s incident tracker only shows six entries as of April 16th, five of which have been rejected by ICERAID’s moderators. A week earlier, the map showed 13 entries, just three of which had been approved. The three non-rejected entries were a JD Vance meme, a photo of Elon Musk handing a $1 million check to a Republican voter in Wisconsin, and a photo of Óscar Romero, the archbishop of El Salvador who was assassinated by a right-wing death squad in 1980 over his opposition to the Salvadoran military government. The Vance and Musk “sightings” have since disappeared, but the picture of Romero remains on ICERAID’s map.
Meyers said via email that ICERAID has received “hundreds” of tips, most of which were “automatically removed because they are determined to be unreliable.” Meyers said ICERAID uses AI to “raise the reliability of the evidence through location verification, gender and age as well as sentiment analysis (happy, sad, angry, etc).” When asked for specifics on ICERAID’s AI, Meyers said the AI “is trained” and “a very limited amount of evidence makes it through validation.”
The app also claims to have a “sponsorship program” for “hard working undocumented immigrant[s] with no criminal history.” It claims to offer “a large reward” for people who pursue “a legal status in the United States through self reporting” on the ICERAID app. Given that it’s nearly impossible for most undocumented immigrants to apply for citizenship or otherwise adjust their status, it’s unclear what kind of “legal status” undocumented immigrants would be pursuing through ICERAID. Meyers’ answer was vague. “We have a network of service providers and experts that deal with these issues and are willing to provide help on a confidential basis,” Meyers said.
It’s also not clear whether anyone is making money for the pictures they’re uploading. Meyers stopped responding to The Verge’s emails when asked about previous accusations that he’d misappropriated investors’ funds, and he didn’t respond to follow-up questions about whether and how much people who use the app are getting paid. ICERAID’s big pitch is that it pays people for photos of “illegal immigration” and other crimes. There’s no indication that actually happens.
And how much money is changing hands through crypto sales? ICERAID had a token presale in February, during which it claims to have sold “65,007,513 ICERAID tokens.” The coin, currently valued at $0.002026 per token, has just 82 holders as of April 16th.
In the weeks leading up to the ICERAID token launch — which was pushed back several times — Meyers spent a considerable amount of time in the ICERAID Telegram channel alternating between posting “beautiful” pictures of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and reassuring people who asked him to refund their presale tokens. Other moderators on the channel urged the skeptics to “trust the process.”
After one user asked Meyers for an official launch date, Meyers responded, “STOP TERRORIZING US OR YOU’LL GET DEPORTED!”
ICERAID isn’t Meyers’ first crypto project. He is also the founder of AuditChain Labs, the parent company that develops both ICERAID and Pacioli.ai, Meyer’s “RegFi” or “regulatory finance” company. He also has a long — and legally contentious — history in the financial world. In 2014, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) permanently banned Meyers from broker-dealer activities, according to the crypto website The Rage. FINRA’s broker database claims that Meyers misappropriated “at least $700,000 of funds raised from 19 investors in a series of private offerings of securities” between 2006 and 2011. According to FINRA, Meyers took “significant portions of the funds raised for his own personal use.” (He neither admitted nor denied the findings).
On Telegram, some early investors expressed frustration with what they described as a perpetually delayed launch of the coin. After one user asked Meyers for an official launch date, Meyers responded, “STOP TERRORIZING US OR YOU’LL GET DEPORTED!” Some members of the Telegram channel seemed to believe that the coin was launching on March 25th. Six days later, Meyers announced that he was pushing the rollout again due to “significant resistance” from the public that required him to implement “all possible security measures to safeguard our platform and community during what can only be considered adversarial wartime conditions.”
When asked what these threats were, Meyers told The Verge that “additional precautions were taken in anticipation of threats, which have not materialized,” but he did not clarify what the threats were. “There was never a formal launch date,” Meyers said via email.
“We are all ready to launch,” Meyers wrote in ICERAID’s Telegram channel three days later, on April 3rd. “The question is do we want to launch today with market conditions the way they are.” The Dow dropped 2,200 points overnight in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs. ICERAID launched the following day.
“We are really trying to have an absolutely smooth launch on this, because we’re going to get such high visibility with the US government entities and other law enforcement groups,” Thomas Herlihy, a crypto personality whose show DYOR Live! hosted the ICERAID launch announcement, said during the livestream. (Herlihy also goes by “Striking Balls.”) “We don’t want it to be seen as a typical crypto project that super-pumps and then doesn’t pump anymore, and then people take their money and leave.”
Via email, Meyers emphasized (underlining and bolding the word “emphasized”) that “the point of the app is NOT to ‘pump’ the coin. The point of the app is to experiment, demonstrate and communicate the technical, economic, and social principals of ‘GovFi,’ which will take time.” He was far less restrained in the Telegram channel, at one point claiming the coin would go to $3 billion. Still, Meyers told potential investors that ICERAID was more than a memecoin. “We are going to make an honest woman out of Solana,” Meyers wrote on Telegram.
Even if ICERAID ends up being little more than a pump-and-dump scheme, some of its recent boosters have an outsized amount of power in Washington. On ICERAID’s Telegram account, Meyers bragged about meeting with Tether founder Brock Pierce. Pierce, a child-star-turned-crypto-mogul, hosted a DOGE appreciation party at his Capitol Hill condo that coincided with the end of the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Loomer — who promoted the project to her 1.6 million followers on X — has so much sway over Trump that the president reportedly fired several National Security Council staffers after she suggested they were insufficiently loyal.
Notwithstanding ICERAID’s clunky interface and the apparent dearth of tips it’s received so far, the marketing push around it indicates a broader right-wing desire to turn everyday people into immigrant-hunting vigilantes. In January, a Mississippi state representative introduced a bill that would have awarded certified bounty hunters with $1,000 for apprehending immigrants who were in the state without authorization. A similar bill was introduced in the Missouri state Senate. That legislation would have created a fund for bounty hunters and others who turned over information resulting in the arrest of undocumented immigrants. Neither bill became a law.
David Gregory, the Missouri state senator who sponsored the bill, disagreed with reporters’ characterization of the bill. “I’m hearing things like, ‘oh, this places a bounty on people.’ No, it doesn’t,” he told CNN. “Just because we’re dispatching bounty hunters after a warrant has been issued is not a bounty. It’s actually a reward system through a hotline.”
ICERAID, on the other hand, has no problem with the word “bounty.” But the financial incentives it claims to offer are dependent on a meme coin that, as of this writing, isn’t worth much at all.
