Returning to the topic of crypto, here are a couple of resources if you’d like to learn more about this high-tech con game that everyone in the US is about to fall victim to.
First, is a segment from the excellent podcast Planet Money, in which they discuss The Memecoin Casino.
The humble memecoin began as a sort of satirical send up of speculation in the crypto world. But it was a joke that soon became very real. In the decade since the launch of Dogecoin in 2013, a series of cultural shifts and technological leaps enabled an explosion in the number of new memecoins. And this memecoin explosion has not only minted millionaires but also led to hordes of unlucky investors and untold scams.
“Unlucky” is a pretty soft descriptor for most of those investors. We need a new word for clueless and greedy people who fail to do their homework before dropping money on a very sketchy product.
But memecoins are certainly not funny anymore. Creating one now is an easy, unregulated, “point-and-click experience”, and “more than 5 million coins have been created” in the past year. All of them are on the hunt for suckers with more money than brains.
DOGE, of course, is also the name of another con job you may have read about in recent news. No coincidence, I’m sure.
Anyway, for a much deeper dive into the financial scam that are cryptocurrencies, subscribe to Molly White’s [citation needed] newsletter.
The flood of information she sends out two or three times a month can be overwhelming but that’s the state of affairs with this constantly churning universe of fraud.
In her most recent issue, Molly explains a “record-shattering hack” of the crypto exchange Bybit, which most of us have never heard of. But being ignored by the easily distracted American news media doesn’t make the crime unimportant.
To put this theft in perspective, the $1.5 billion stolen from Bybit alone surpasses the North Korean cyberattackers’ entire 2024 profits from crypto heists: around $1.34 billion from across 47 separate attacks throughout 2024. It’s more than double what they stole the year prior. According to the United Nations and the US government, these thefts have been a substantial source of funding for the country’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
Tell me again how secure cryptocurrencies are. The future of money indeed.
Molly also covers the latest attempts by the con-man-in-chief to cozy up to and profit from the crypto industrial complex. Including his proposal to establish a “crypto strategic reserve”, which would be created through buying certain specific coins.
As she notes, those assets “were certainly not chosen at random, and give us some insight into who’s got the ear of the president (at least at the current moment)”. They have his ear, of course, because they also lined his pockets.
The big con continues, in more ways than one.
When it comes to cons, I prefer mine fictional and entertaining, as in the classic film The Sting. See also Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, A Fish Called Wanda, and many of the others on this list.