One of the best things about the crypto world is that scammers have an unlimited supply of people to scam.
That’s according to Matt Binder, reporter for Mashable and host of the podcasts Doomed and Scam Economy, who on this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast told host Kelly Weill and guest host Sam Brodey, a congressional reporter at The Daily Beast, that crypto investors are suckers for a scam.
“Even though the actual world of crypto, like the people who are really investing money in it, is kind of small,” Binder explained.
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“These scammers can easily double-dip on them because it seems like crypto investors always fall for scams. There’s no ‘Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,’ it’s literally, ‘Fool me 3,000 times and I’ll keep on getting fooled,’ because they get scammed over and over and over again.
“That’s sort of the allure though, that if you’re going to invest in crypto it’s because you think you’re gonna get rich quick. So every get-rich-quick scheme that is obviously a scam, you’re going to fall for if you’re one of those crypto hustlers.”
Binder uses the example of Seth Green, the actor who this year was the victim of a crypto scam after hackers stole his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT and converted it to cash.
In July, Bored Ape Yacht Club was reported as “one of the most valuable and successful collections of crypto non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to date,” according to Forbes, citing some that sell for over $2 million alone. Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, and Steve Aoki are reportedly among the big names to have made such purchases.
Explains Binder: “So Seth Green used his Bored Ape to create a TV series. He spent all this money on a live action-slash-animated mixed sort of pilot with actors, and it heavily features the main character, his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. And after he completed production and it was ready to go and be unveiled at some crypto conference, someone scammed him and stole his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, which means he no longer held the NFT, thus he no longer held the IP rights to it. So he couldn’t release that TV pilot that he created without first getting back the NFT.
“So he already spent six figures on the NFT originally and then he ended up convincing the person who was holding the NFT—who would claim they bought it from the scammer so they say they weren’t the person who stole it from him—he then had to pay that person an additional six figures to get it back, all so he can actually get this pilot seen.
“It’s [a] pretty incredible scam. If the guy who was holding it actually was the scammer, I mean, well done, but either way Seth Green had to spend… like half a mil for this Bored Ape NFT on top of the cost of actually producing the pilot featuring that Bored Ape.”
In this week’s “Fresh Hell” segment, the hosts discuss the motivation and meaning behind the recent Trump rally in Ohio where supporters held up one finger in a “weird” salute.
“The short answer of it is nobody has any really great explanation,” Weill says. “There’s some good running theories. If you ask the real Trump obsessives, the people who are deep in the Trump lore, they’re not sure either.
“The leading theories are either that the one finger stood for the QAnon slogan… maybe it was a reference to America First. It’s also possible that, as is the case in crowd events like this, maybe one person just started doing it and everybody picked it up, not even knowing what it was.”
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
