Kishu Inu: Creator Charged Over an Alleged $9M Rug Pull of a $1.6B Dog Coin

On 28 May 2021, with the price of his dog-themed coin sliding and its buyers getting nervous, the man who called himself "Kishu Man" posted a reassurance to the Kishu Inu groups on Telegram and Reddit. The developers had bought their coins like everybody else, the message said. They owned only 1.7% of the supply. This was not a rug pull.

Five years later a federal grand jury in Chicago says almost none of that was true. On 6 October 2026 it indicted Alexander Sisemore, 28, of Fayetteville, Arkansas, also known as "Kishu Man" and "Kimbo", on three counts of wire fraud. The indictment says Sisemore and his co-founder quietly gave themselves 12% of all Kishu Inu before a single coin was sold to the public, then sold their share while telling buyers the opposite. Prosecutors put Sisemore's profit at about $9 million. Kishu Inu, which was worth more than $1.6 billion at its peak in May 2021, is now valued at about $7.5 million, 99.6% below its high, according to CoinGecko.

Sisemore has not been convicted of anything. "The public is reminded that an indictment is not evidence of guilt," the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois said when it announced the case on 7 October. "The defendant is presumed innocent and entitled to a fair trial at which the government has the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." His lawyer, Nishay Sanan, told the Chicago Tribune he did not believe the government would be able to prove what was charged, and that his client looked forward to fighting the case in court.

©CMZ chart. Data: US v. Sisemore indictment

What Kishu Inu was

Kishu Inu is a memecoin: a token with no company, earnings or assets behind it, whose price depends only on how many people want to buy it. Owning one is closer to holding a raffle ticket than a share. It was named after the Kishu, a Japanese hunting dog, and it was one of dozens of copies of Shiba Inu (SHIB), itself a joke copy of Dogecoin, that appeared in spring 2021 when dog coins were the hottest trade on the internet.

The indictment says Kishu Inu was created in April 2021 on Ethereum, a blockchain: a public ledger, like a bank statement anyone can read, that records every transfer. On 17 April one hundred quadrillion tokens (a 1 followed by 17 zeros) landed in a single wallet, which the indictment calls the Kishu Inu Deployer. With that many coins, each one was priced in tiny fractions of a cent.

Then came May. Dogecoin peaked around the night Tesla's Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live on 8 May, and money spilled into the copies. A Kishu Inu token cost about $0.00000000026 on 3 May 2021, which made all the coins together worth roughly $25 million. On 14 May CoinGecko recorded its all-time high of $0.0000000175. That is a rise of nearly 70 times in less than two weeks, and it took the coin's market value (the price of one token multiplied by the number of tokens, the same sum used to value a listed company) past $1.6 billion. The indictment says about 283,000 people came to hold it.

The project's three websites, kishuinu.finance, kishu.finance and kishu.com, and its white paper (the founding document, similar to a prospectus) all made the same promise. "Kishu Inu was fair-launched, and the dev team has no 'team tokens'," the sites said. "In other words, our creators had to purchase $KISHU on the open-market." A May 2021 version of the white paper called it "a community-owned project with no tokens reserved for the team," running "primarily on volunteers and donations from the community." Kishu.com told visitors to "Join the moon mission."

What prosecutors say happened

In the crypto trade, a "fair launch" means the founders get no free coins. Everybody, including the team, has to buy in the open market at the same price. It was the main selling point of the dog coins of 2021, because the opposite, a team sitting on a pile of free coins, is how a rug pull starts.

A rug pull, in the indictment's words, is when the people behind a coin "abruptly or gradually withdraw from the project, sell or trade some or most of their tokens" and keep the buyers' money. In stock market terms it is a founder dumping undisclosed shares on the public while telling shareholders the founders own almost nothing.

According to the indictment, after the 100 quadrillion tokens were created and before any were offered for sale, the co-founder, identified only as Individual A and known online as "Inu Dev" and "Jake", moved about 6% of the supply to four wallets owned by Sisemore and another 6% to four wallets of his own. That is 12 quadrillion tokens. At the May 2021 peak price, Sisemore's 6% alone would have been worth roughly $100 million on paper.

Prosecutors say the founders, along with a large holder known as "Churro" (Individual B) who did marketing and moderated the project's social media, told investors from April 2021 until at least October 2023 that the launch was fair, that the team held 1.7%, that the biggest holders had bought in a "private sale" rather than received free coins, that the founders were holding rather than selling, and that there was no rug pull. Most of those claims, the indictment says, were made while answering "FUD", the crypto term for fear, uncertainty and doubt, on Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.

Meanwhile, the indictment says, Sisemore and Individual A sold their hidden coins, spreading the sales across many wallets and through crypto mixers (services that blend many people's coins together so the trail is hard to follow). Sisemore made about $9 million, it says, and Individual A about $800,000. Individual A has not been publicly charged.

Three trades on Gate.io

Each of the three wire fraud counts is a single sale on Gate.io, a crypto exchange (the equivalent of a broker) based in the Cayman Islands, in exchange for USDT, a stablecoin, or digital dollar, designed to stay worth $1.

On 13 October 2021, the indictment says, Sisemore sold 1,142,273,793,317 Kishu Inu for 2,210 USDT. On 27 October he sold 4,735,873,238,550 for 39,308 USDT. On 6 November he sold 3,217,755,209,114 for 21,398 USDT. The dates matter. In late October 2021 Kishu Inu had a second rally, its price roughly doubling on 27 October alone according to DefiLlama price records, and two of the three trades land inside it. Together the three sales of nine trillion tokens came to about $63,000, a small slice of the alleged $9 million total.

The indictment also asks the court to seize the proceeds, including a Crypto.com account in Sisemore's name and two Ethereum wallets.

Warning signs of a rug pull

Most rug pulls give themselves away before the money disappears. For ordinary buyers, these are the signs.

A promise instead of proof. "No team tokens" and "the founders hold 1.7%" are claims. On Ethereum every wallet's holdings are public, but a team can split its coins across many wallets, which is exactly what the indictment says happened here.

Anonymous founders. Kishu Inu's leaders went by "Kishu Man" and "Inu Dev". A buyer of a listed share knows the directors' names. A memecoin buyer usually does not, and has nobody to sue.

A copy of something that just went up. Kishu Inu arrived because Shiba Inu had made early buyers rich. Copies are cheap to make, and the people who make them are usually the first to sell.

Prices in fractions of a cent. A token priced at $0.00000001 looks cheap and is not. What matters is the market value of all the coins together, which for Kishu Inu passed $1.6 billion.

Answers to doubt instead of facts. A team that responds to hard questions by calling them FUD, and tells holders to keep holding, is asking for trust it has not earned.

Liquidity that only goes one way. Liquidity is how easily something can be sold without crashing its price. In a memecoin, the cash in the market is the newer buyers' money, so when an insider sells, it is those buyers who pay.