The Expert Podcast

Look for the past two years plus almost three now, we've received a lot of inquiries from people that were scammed by some fake crypto investment scheme or some online fraud or online scam. A lot of times, it was just a made-up company that made it look like they were an investment and they promised to put your money in bitcoin or something else. It turns out that even some of the major platforms that were more or less legitimate are creating losses for investors. Here's a company called 3ac; they had 10 billion dollars of investor money, and they went bankrupt. Their executives are gone; they're missing. This is not one of these online, fly-by-night scams that were taking people's money. This was a legitimate, big-time company, presumably, and who knows where the money went. The money's gone, and the founders and the executives are all gone. This isn't like a Ponzi scheme or a social media chain letter company; this was a big-time company that was major in the marketplace.

As these crypto and bitcoin-type securities start to reduce in value, it turns out that some of these were leveraged so high that unless the value stayed at that higher level, it didn't create the capitalization for these companies to continue as an ongoing concern. So, if you've been a victim of one of these companies, if you have money in them, let us know what happened. Did you have any warning signs? Did you have any advance notice? Did they ask you to put more money in at the end before they went bankrupt? These crypto scams are starting to unwind.

The other reason we know this is because the large volume of inquiries we got for online scams really happened between the middle and end of 2019 and the end of 2020. The volume started to decrease by the end of last year and the beginning of this year, which means there were fewer of these scams out there. This is because the values of cryptocurrency were going down, and fewer people were interested in doing it. Now we're back to corporate fraud, embezzlement, asset checks, and even probate fraud. But the crypto scams are starting to slow down because this was a flash in the pan. The crypto investing and the frauds around it was kind of a one-time event that has seemed like it's passed its prime.