The Surprising Downside of Being a Crypto Hustler

[ad_1]

One of the best things about the crypto world is that scammers have an unlimited supply of people to scam.

Thats according to Matt Binder, reporter for Mashable and host of the podcasts Doomed and Scam Economy, who on this weeks episode of The Daily Beasts 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.

These scammers can easily double-dip on them because it seems like crypto investors always fall for scams. Theres no Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, its literally, Fool me 3,000 times and Ill keep on getting fooled, because they get scammed over and over and over again.

Thats sort of the allure though, that if youre going to invest in crypto its because you think youre gonna get rich quick. So every get-rich-quick scheme that is obviously a scam, youre going to fall for if youre 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 couldnt 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 NFTwho would claim they bought it from the scammer so they say they werent the person who stole it from himhe then had to pay that person an additional six figures to get it back, all so he can actually get this pilot seen.

Its [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 weeks 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. Theres some good running theories. If you ask the real Trump obsessives, the people who are deep in the Trump lore, theyre 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. Its 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.

[ad_2]