Richard Lawler is a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget.

“The Strange $55 Million Saga of a Netflix Series You’ll Never See,” reported in 2023 by the New York Times, is now a criminal matter, as today prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged director Carl Erik Rinsch with wire fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes. They allege that after Netflix (referred to as Streaming Company-1 in the indictment) won the bidding for his 13-episode show, it paid $44 million over the course of 2018 and 2019 to produce the sci-fi series about a species of superintelligent humanlike clones.

According to the Times report, Netflix secured the show by offering millions more than Amazon and promising Rinsch, whose only feature film is 47 Ronin, final cut.

The fraud he’s being charged with came into play once he told Netflix he’d need an additional $11 million to finish the show, which was originally called White Horse before it was renamed Conquest. After Netflix sent the money in March of 2020, however, Rinsch allegedly took the money for himself, putting $10.5 million in a brokerage account and losing more than half of it in less than two months while telling Netflix that work on the show was “awesome and moving forward really well.”

He had better luck with the rest of the money, making crypto investments starting in the spring of 2021 that prosecutors say “eventually proved profitable.” However, as detailed by the Times, his behavior became erratic, and after Netflix canceled development in 2021, he sent executives emails claiming he’d found a way to map “the coronavirus signal emanating from within the earth” and told his wife he could predict earthquakes

His crypto speculation went well enough that Rinsch allegedly spent $10 million on himself, including over a million dollars to pay for lawyers to sue Netflix in an attempt to get more money, buy five Rolls-Royces and one Ferrari, and spend nearly a million bucks on two mattresses, bedding, and linens. According to the Times, Rinsch claimed they were props for the show, but a mediator who ruled last year that he owed Netflix $12 million decided none of them were necessary for the production.

White Horse still has not been completed.