The Expert Podcast

Look there's been a lot of talk about cryptocurrency Bitcoin as an investment and money floating around back and forth between all these different investments and even . outside of a pure investment there's been a lot of scams people who have , been . Scammed and defrauded out of their money for fake . Crypto investments A lot of this comes from social media . A lot of it comes from unsolicited emails . To a person claiming that they have this great investment you put money in and you'll double your money in a month or whatever it is . And purportedly through cryptocurrency . Even when there was a legitimate . Cryptocurrency . Or . Digital currency platform . Some of these are turning out to be under capitalized . the most common one is Celsius . and that's been locked up . Withdrawals have been blocked . So if you have money in there you can't take it out . It's not the only one There's been some other ones that have done this . at the time of this writing it's been almost a month . Hm . they halted all customer withdrawals . Most people that are wondering if they ever see their money again If you're halting withdrawals it means that you don't have enough money to give out to everybody . And the question is where did the money go ? If people put money in to buy crypto . That digital currency should be existing somewhere unless some of the money went to pay expenses of that company . At this point everything's alleged there's no . criminal referrals that we know of according to one of the victims . she said she had , you know six figures worth of . digital currency tied up in this account . And . They can't take it out . And the reason they claimed is to stabilize liquidity What that means That's a code word for we got no money . And we can't give it to you cause not enough to go around . And here's the key This is a key to to . You know Due diligence on investments and also to vet out potential losses It's such a huge company And there's so many people that I felt somewhere in the back of my head . That . I'm not going to lose everything The size of the company and how many people are there don't matter There's been the huge companies that have gone bankrupt . We just saw the NRIA real estate investment company go bankrupt 600 and something billion dollars of the investor cash . A lot of this has to do with . Debt and leverage some of these companies . Borrowed a lot against their crypto . And when the crypto is declining and the prices are going down , there's a credit crunch where you borrow against your crypto holdings . And the underlying value goes down You might get a margin call from your lender You might not be able to borrow more . these companies have sprung up . To offer services that seem like they're banking paying interest on deposits making loans . And offering . High interest rates Sometimes 20% . Anytime you see a high interest rate that's a red flag . And it may be that these companies weren't able to . Pay all their expenses running a company's expensive running a bank is even more expensive . And it looks like it's traditional finance , but there's no oversight meaning that they don't have FDIC They don't have sec regulations monitoring it Like they monitor chase or Wells Fargo as an actual bank . It looks like this platform at least is considering bankruptcy . They've hired attorneys and consultants to . look at restructuring or bankruptcy . A lot of people have lost money Some people were saving money to buy a house . Hopefully the investors had some type of diversification So all their money wasn't in crypto I looked there was a big upside . You know when crypto was in five or six thousand dollar range if you had , you know bought two or three then and now it was at 50 you could have hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit . As long as you were diversified And even if it went down you sold some and had some money in other , types of assets stocks real estate . Cash . But if you had all your money in crypto as a wildly fluctuating asset with big promises you may be in rough shape . Even if you weren't flat out scammed If the crypto market is crashing and the leverage is creating a margin call you could be in big trouble .