When a cryptocurrency you never heard of drains your life savings

> What if you thought you did the research and still lost everything?

> the company compared its offerings to traditional savings accounts. Except where a brick-and-mortar bank like Citi was giving depositors less than 1% interest, Stablegains could offer up to 15%

Any kind of research would tell you this is a scam, without needing to investigate further than the second quote above. I think it should be illegal, but I have no sympathy for people who basically just were greedy and thought they were smart and got tricked into a scam.

> “Like I was Googling Roth IRAs, mutual funds, so of course Google and Facebook have to be in cahoots with each other because all of a sudden you start seeing investment things advertised on Facebook.”

So he was trying to search for a normal investment, and FB via Google convinced him to give crypto a chance with his life savings. Thats messed up.

From TFA:

> Many Stablegains users — including bartenders, postal workers and general contractors — feel they were misled by Stablegains’ marketing, which stressed the safety, ease and promise of decentralized finance, or “DeFi” for short.

From the bottom of Stablegains website:

> There is a range of safeguards in place to help secure your deposits, however holding and depositing stablecoins with Stablegains and third party lending platforms still carries significant risk. Please carefully read our Terms of Use and Risk disclosures[1] in our Learning Center before making a deposit. Any deposit with Stablegains and third party lending platforms is entirely your responsibility. You understand that your principal is at risk.

1. https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402680696...

From Overview of risks:

> As Stablegains is not a traditional US bank, the funds are not secured by the FDIC. While we aim to make every effort to understand and mitigate everything that can possibly go wrong, there is still a non-zero risk you can lose your deposit. Our advice is to diversify and never invest all of your savings in a single place.

Who the heck invests their life savings, all of it, in this kind of scheme?

> “I felt, ‘Wow, they have a lot of confidence by richer, smarter people than me,'” Insall said. “It sounds like a no-brainer.”

Ugh. What a terribly expensive lesson to learn. :-(

I feel that there's a type of person who invests $320,000 based on a facebook ad into something they didn't understand.

I don't want to disparage them, but it feels like it was a matter of time before they lost that to some scam or other.

They were pocketing 25% of the interest payments and providing near-zero additional value to customer on a single-item portfolio. They could have at least bought an InsurAce policy for 2% and they’d still have a 15% margin for doing nothing except batching transactions.

Isn't there regulation around calling something a "savings account"? My savings account isn't just detached from the volatility of crypto, it can't go down in value at all. It's a totally separate category from investment accounts

When it comes to money, a golden rule will help you when everyone is losing their minds over gambling, "there is no such thing as a free lunch".