The Surprising Downside of Being a Crypto Hustler

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

That’s what Matt Binder, reporter for Mashable and host of the Doom and Scam Economy podcasts, says in this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever dreams podcast, host Kelly Weill and guest host Sam Brodey, a congressional reporter at The Daily Beast, shared that crypto investors are hungry for scams.

“Even though the actual crypto world, like the people who really invest money in it, is kind of small,” Binder explained.

“These scammers can easily double them because it seems like crypto investors are always falling for scams. It’s not, ‘Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,’ it’s literally, ‘Fool me 3,000 times and I will continue to be deceived,” because they are deceived over and over and over again.

“It’s kind of a lure though, that if you’re going to invest in crypto, it’s because you think you’re going to get rich quick. So every get-rich-quick scheme that’s obviously a scam, you’re going to fall for if you are one of these crypto hustlers.”

Binder uses the example of Seth Green, the actor who this year fell victim to 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 who have made such purchases.

Explains Binder: “So Seth Green used his Bored Ape to make a TV series. He spent all that money on a live action-slash-animated mixed-gen pilot with actors, and it largely features his protagonist Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. And after he finished the production and it was ready to go and be unveiled at a crypto conference, someone scammed him and stole his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, meaning he no longer had the NFT, and thus he no longer had the IP- the rights to it. So he couldn’t release the TV pilot he created without first getting NFT back.

“So he was already spending six figures on the NFT originally, and then he ended up convincing the person who held 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 had to then pay that person another six figures to get it back, all so he can actually get this pilot seen.

“It is [a] pretty unbelievable scam. If the guy holding it was actually the scammer, I mean, well done, but regardless, Seth Green had to spend… half a million for this Bored Ape NFT on top of the cost of actually producing the pilot with 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 a finger in a “weird” salute.

“The short answer is that no one has a really good explanation,” says Weill. “There are some good running theories. If you ask the real Trump obsessives, the people deep in Trump lore, they’re not sure either.

“The leading theories are either that 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 public events like this, maybe a person just started doing it and everyone picked it up, not even knowing what it was.”

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