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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.

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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 an...