The Expert Podcast

All right by now everybody's seeing the news about the failure and demise of the big FTX crypto conglomerate that has crashed and burned and the only thing I can say is let's hope that this puts a monkey wrench into a lot of these crypto scams. And I'm not talking about this type of scam where this company has collapsed. I'm talking about the scams where people get messages on social media and Facebook and Instagram and other apps that says hey, send your money to us and we'll invest it in crypto and we'll double your money.

These are fly-by-night operators, many times in other countries, that take people's life savings — 10, 15, 20, 100, 200 million dollars — and it's common. You know, our firm gets dozens of inquiries every single day from victims who have sent anywhere from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands to these online scammers. When cryptocurrency was going through the roof and every day in the news people could see that Bitcoin was doubling and all these crypto things were materializing, people fell victim to the hype and the rush.

Right — it wasn't about that these crypto platforms were a scam. These scammers were not even putting money into crypto. They would just say, “Send us $10,000, we'll invest it in crypto and we'll double your money.” They were just taking the money and putting it in their pocket. Right — whether crypto is a scam or not is a whole different deal. These scammers were using the crypto subject and the hype around it and the news as a way to get people's attention.

Hopefully, the fact that this FTX has crashed and burned — you know, by itself that's a whole other fraud that needs to be investigated, allegedly — but hopefully it'll put some cold water on the whole digital currency pipe so that unsuspecting victims will stop falling for these online social media and email scams. And the scammers will have to try harder to take people's money because, like I said, you know every single day we get dozens that have lost money. And even if it's a small amount of money — $10,000 or $12,000 — for some people that's all their money.

We had one last week where somebody had sent a few hundred thousand — that was all their money. They saw account statements that were being generated by the scammers that showed their money had doubled. So they went and they took a second mortgage on their house to get more money. They sent the scammer that money. When it doubled again, they said, “I want to make even more money.” They borrowed $100,000 from a relative, sent that money to the scammer — then the scammer disappeared. So now they're out the money.

Hopefully this FTX implosion will put some negative light on digital currency. If it only has the effect of slowing people down from falling for these scams, that would be a great thing.