By Matthew Gault Published March 19, 2025 | Comments (0) | Director Carl Erik Rinsch attends New Directors' Showcase In Los Angeles presented by Team One, Saatchi LA on September 23, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by John Sciulli/Getty Images for Team One, Saatchi LA During the heady early days of the Streaming Wars, Netflix spent more than $55 million on a sci-fi show created by the guy who directed the forgotten Keanu Reeves box office bomb 47 Ronin. According to a federal indictment, the director stole $11 million from the streaming giant and spent it on Dogecoin and Rolls Royces. The saga of director Carl Erik Rinsch and Netflix deal has been going on for years. The streamer has been trying to claw its money back from the guy for a long time and Rinsch has spent a lot of the last five years in and out of court hearings related to his divorce and arbitration rooms related to curdled Netflix deal. Now the FBI is charging him with fraud. Carl Rinsch allegedly stole more than $11 million from a prominent streaming platform to finance lavish purchases and personal investments instead of completing a promised television series, FBI Assistant Director Leslie Backschies said in a press release about the case. The FBI will continue to reel in any individual who seeks to defraud businesses. The FBI also released a copy of its indictment against Rinsch which has some new details about the case and some grainy screenshots of what the director did manage to complete. FBI photos. The story begins in 2018. Rinsch was five years out from the failure of 47 Ronin, but streamers were tossing money at every half-baked idea on the planet, desperate to fill their services with content. Rinschs idea was White Horse.White Horse was a science fiction television show about a scientist who created a group of superintelligent clones, the indictment said. Those clones were banished to a walled area in a Brazilian city, where they began developing advanced technology and came into conflict with humans and each other. White Horse is a reference to one of four horsemen of the apocalypse, who rides a white horse. Death. The horseman who sits upon a pale horse is Death.After a bidding war, Netflix signed a deal with Rinsch. The plan was to make a 13-episode show that would run about two and a half hours and air as episodes that ran 4 to 10 minutes long. Rinsch did shoot some footage, and there are screenshots of the show in the indictment. But he also allegedly got weird. According to witnesses and his divorce proceedings, Rinsch was abusing prescription amphetamine and getting paranoid. He punched holes in the wall and would vanish. He missed meetings with execs and blew deadlines. Yet, somehow, he convinced Netflix to give him another $11 million. And its this second injection of Netflix money thats at the heart of the fraud case. The forensic tracking on those millions is well documented. According to the charging documents, Rinsch moved the funds out of his production company and into personal bank accounts before consolidating them into a trust. Then he made bad investments and lost half of it. While [Rinsch] was in the process of losing most of the $11 million intended to complete White Horse, he falsely informed [Netflix] that White Horse was awesome and moving forward really well,' the indictment said.He took the $4 million he had remaining from the Netflix money and bet it all on Dogecoin. It paid off and he pocketed a cool $27 million. Thank you and god bless crypto, he said in an online chat with a crypto-exchange rep as he pulled the money out of Doge and into his bank account. Then, according to the FBI, Rinsch went on a spending spree. According to the indictment, he burned through $10 million and spent $1,787,000 on credit card bills, $2,417,000 on five Rolls Royces and a Ferrari, $638,00 on two mattresses, and $1,073,000 for lawyers to sue Netflix and to help him with a divorce. At the time, he claimed Netflix owed him $14 million.The feds charged Rinsch with one count of wire fraud, one count of money laundering, and five counts of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity. The first two charges carry a maximum sentence of 20 years, the last five carry a max of 10 years each. The streaming wars are over and well never see White Horse. It sucks that the hard work of the cast and crew will go up in smoke, but Rinschs antics are probably more entertaining than a sci-fi epic made from 10-minute-long episodes about super-intelligent clones.Daily NewsletterYou May Also Like By Germain Lussier Published March 18, 2025 By Germain Lussier Published March 18, 2025 By Isaiah Colbert Published March 18, 2025 By Isaiah Colbert Published March 17, 2025 By Cheryl Eddy Published March 13, 2025 By Sabina Graves Published March 12, 2025