The 21-year-old teaches Dallas seniors about crypto, NFTs and selfies

On Friday afternoon at the Preston of Park Cities retirement home, 16 seniors look up expectantly at their teacher: a 21-year-old former president of the blockchain club at the University of Texas at Austin.

Elevator music plays in the background of the quiet meeting room as he introduces his presentation titled “Crypto Crash Course.”

A few seconds into the lecture, the first comment comes from the crowd: “I can’t hear.”

The luxury senior residence on Sherry Lane has regular classes, but this is the first to delve into the complexities of cryptocurrencies and NFTs – subjects with few experts even among younger generations.

“I was a guest lecturer at my university for an introductory blockchain course just because there aren’t many people who know enough to teach this,” said Owen Robertson, the young crypto lecturer majoring in information systems management. He also sits on the board of the McCombs School of Business Blockchain Initiative and works as a marketing associate at the blockchain company Quai Network.

Preston advertised the class as a way to educate residents on legitimate crypto avenues and how to avoid being scammed. The class meets three times in total, once in person in July and twice virtually in August. The classes will also provide an overview of non-fungible tokens – or a unique, individual token on the blockchain that you can buy, sell or trade – and each resident will walk away from the course with their own NFT.

The idea for the talk came from a brainstorming session for the community’s monthly programming series that focuses on spiritual, emotional, vocational, physical, social, environmental and intellectual well-being, said Debra Dickerson, director of community life at The Preston.

“In this case, we wanted to give them access to a crypto, NFT and internet fraud expert, to help them better identify online threats and people looking to take advantage of seniors,” she said.

At the first meeting, there were four fewer people than in a typical community-hosted class, Dickerson said.

“I knew it might be hard to get them interested in this, so I promised chocolate ice cream and wine to everyone who came,” Dickerson said. “They see ‘crypto’ and say, ‘I don’t know what that is.’

Elder fraud has increased dramatically with the rise of the digital age, which has brought new and easier ways to trick people through phishing emails and text messages. Last year, US seniors were defrauded of $1.7 billion through scams, a 74% increase from 2020, according to a report by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. Of the complaints received from seniors over the age of 60, over 5,000 mentioned some form of virtual currency, such as Bitcoin, for a total loss of $241.1 million.

Robertson opened the talk by telling the story of the Lazarus Group, North Korean hackers believed to have stolen as much as $100 million in cryptocurrency from a US company in June.

“Scammers can be very sophisticated,” Robertson told the audience. “The best practice is to never click on a link or PDF unless you know the person who sent it to you and have spoken with them.”

Robertson told a story of his own where someone texted him and pretended to be his boss. But when he got the text, Robertson was sitting across from his boss.

“Is one way they come to you by saying you’ve won a prize?” asked one of the audience, saying that he had received such a text.

“Yes,” said Robertson. “If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

Robertson was referring to the cryptocurrency called Luna, which fell from $116 in early April to essentially zero, causing many investors to lose large sums. If you had bought the coin in the first three months and sold it at its peak when it reached a market cap of more than $40 billion, you could have made 1000 times your original investment.

“This is an example of it being too good to be true. The token was originally trusted as the Amazon of the crypto world,” he said. “But it went from zero to zero.”

Cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed in popularity because of the ease of access to them via the internet and because of the chance for big monetary gains, he said.

“There are a lot of people who have bet their lives on crypto, and I would say they should never do that,” he said.

Robertson’s opinion is that the industry needs five to ten years to “let the dust settle” before it is a safe investment. As someone in the audience jokingly pointed out, that meant it was largely off-limits to the older audience.

“Ninety-nine percent of what’s out right now is not worth the risk,” he said of the industry, which is just over a decade old. “Don’t trust anyone’s opinion without verifying it yourself.”

But for seniors who were still interested, Robertson said they would be best off investing in Bitcoin and staying away from all other cryptocurrencies. That’s partly because the supply limit has always been 21 million coins, while other cryptocurrencies have an infinite supply, he said.

“Most of the cryptocurrencies we see today will not be relevant in five years,” he said. “It’s going to change over time. I see it as the internet in the 1990s.”

Robertson ended the class by asking, “Can we take a selfie together? I would like to turn it into an NFT.”

“What is a selfie?” asked an audience member.

The reality of crypto scams

Most seniors who fall victim to crypto scams weren’t trying to buy crypto for themselves, said Blake Cohen, a senior blockchain investigator in Austin. He works to prevent fraud and scams on the Okcoin cryptocurrency exchange.

“The same traditional scams that were used with banks and payment apps are moving to crypto because it’s faster and cheaper,” he said. “And once the fraudster gets it to their own private digital wallet, the victim can’t get it back.”

The most common crypto scams Cohen sees are hackers posing as tech support who need to take over someone’s computer to help them with non-existent problems like a computer virus. The fraudster then gains control of his bank account and can send cryptocurrency funds to his private digital wallet. The 2021 FBI report shows that this tech support scam was the most common scam victimized by elders in 2021, with 13,900 victims.

“It’s the most devastating kind of fraud,” Cohen said.

For someone to buy a token on Okcoin, the platform requires them to submit an official photo identification, such as a passport or driver’s license, and a selfie of themselves. But Cohen said they don’t know if that person signs up on their own or because a scammer asked them to create an account. If red flags come up, like a senior signing up and immediately transferring $100,000 into their account, Cohen will sometimes ask the senior why they’re setting up the account and if they’re doing it on their own, he said.

“Even if we stop that, the fraudster can get them to go to another platform and they’re still being scammed,” he said.

In a worst-case scenario, Cohen said he saw a victim lose millions of dollars because they tried to extend the warranty on their antivirus software. The tech support scammer said he would extend it to the victim, but once he got control of the computer, he bought cryptocurrencies and sent them to his digital wallet instead.

“I can track where the money went, but you can’t get it back once it’s in someone else’s digital wallet,” he said. “They control it.”

A common tactic scammers use is to create a sense of urgency, insisting that the victim must take action now, Cohen said.

“If you’re an older person, stop for a second and take a step back and think, ‘Does what I’m doing make sense right now?'” he said. “If there is any doubt, stop.”

And for family members, it’s okay to check in with your older relatives, he said.

“We’ve had a bunch of fraud stopped because a younger relative realized something was wrong and contacted us,” Cohen said. “[Crypto scams] is one of the most devastating problems in the industry, and very few people are aware that it exists.”