If it wasn't a crypto scam, it would be a lottery scam, or a job offer scam, or romance/pigbutchering scam, or a tech support phone scam, or a meatspace MLM scam like Amway and Herbalife. There is no shortage of ways gullible, financially-illiterate people can be separated from their money.
IDK. It's one thing to fall for a scam and lose all your money. It's another thing to, after all that, go to your board of directors, ask permission to invest bank money in the scam, and when they say "We don't feel comfortable with this" tell them "Too late, I already invested the company's money in this for you." This is not a financially illiterate person, but someone who seemingly knew he needed board approval for an investment at scale, yet simultaneously ignored it and assumed he would be given it when asking retroactively.
There's a great many other failures of control here, like staff disobeying policy when he told them to. And perhaps it's my family history speaking here, but I suspect this guy has an undiagnosed mental illness (bipolar?).
One of the companies I work with recently started looking at partnering with this company: https://scamnetic.com/
I like the idea of providing better education about scams to consumers, but this company gives me some pretty weird vibes. I wonder if we're on the cusp of another security theater boom similar to the plethora of companies that sprung up around identity theft and mostly seemed to exist to allow companies to mitigate any responsibility for their poor data and security practices.
Edit: Further, "education" shouldn't even be a factor here. You should not need to protect yourself from being scammed. Taking advantage of people's trust and stealing their money should be illegal, the offenders should be punished, and the victims made whole. There is no reason in a civilized society to permit financial crimes, which is what this shit is. Stealing is fucking stealing, whether you take something from a store, whether a bank issues bullshit fees, whether an employer doesn't pay fair wages, whether a con man tricks you into buying ape pictures.
Under the current administration, you need to protect yourself far more than before.
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is gone.
- The Justice Department will focus on "violent crime", even though that's mostly the job of local law enforcement and the FBI doesn't handle 911 calls. In terms of dollars, white collar crime is far bigger than violent crime. (Burglary in the US is way down, about a fifth of what it was in 1990.)
- The administration plan is to move crypto enforcement from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Heavy payoffs by the crypto industry have enabled this. [1]
It's called "deregulation", suckers. Open season on Americans.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/technology/crypto-industr...
>whether a bank issues bullshit fees, whether an employer doesn't pay fair wages, whether a con man tricks you into buying ape pictures.
So basically giving someone a bad deal is therefore theft? This isn't a principled idea to hold, it is pretty much a slippery slope to call any transaction you don't like theft afterwards.
One advantage of cryptocurrency is that it prevents parties from "renegotiating" deals like this after they've made them. Fraud is pretty uncommon on say, the silk road or something for the same reason it's uncommon on ebay or craigslist: when consumers have to actively consider the trust networks they are using, the market becomes more transparent and trustworthy. When you defer to some arbitrary, opaque authority to settle transactions, that's when you get situations like this.
It's not about whether or not I personally like it, it's about whether or not it has the value it's ascribed to. NFTs are murkier in that some people believe they have value, and I guess that's fair. I think it's demonstrably false, but I doubt a person who believes they have value would consider an NFT purchase fraudulent, and therefore would not pursue it.
If however a given person was suckered into buying an NFT by someone, and later realized it was worthless, I think that's absolutely something that at least bears considering in terms of it being fraud, in a court of law. I don't see how it's different from any other situation where a given individual has sold worthless assets.
> One advantage of cryptocurrency is that it prevents parties from "renegotiating" deals like this after they've made them.
One huge disadvantage is that on any cryptocurrency with any decent amount of traffic as a currency is that the value of it shifts wildly from the beginning to end of the transaction. And that can bite either party to the transaction, which is why the only currencies that see substantial use as a currency are the ones with low adoption rates. It's basically pointless to accept, for example, Etherium as payment unless you yourself are speculating on it's future value. But that's not a currency then, not in any normies' definition. A hundred dollars is worth the same today, for all intents and purposes, as it was a year ago. Plus or minus a few percent for inflation. The $4 you plunk down for a fancy coffee is not going to be worth $0.50 or $400 by the time the barista hands you the cup, otherwise no one would use money.
> When you defer to some arbitrary, opaque authority to settle transactions, that's when you get situations like this.
Cryptocurrency defers to the blockchain, and the various software that interacts with it. This is literally no difference to deferring to any other centralized institution to form trust. The only difference is the layman has no way to seek justice from a blockchain.