Cryptocurrency scam: Man swindled out of pension and life savings
bbc.com
bbc.com
I think we should punish these ads & its associated companies for not indicating that there is risk in investing cryptos. These ads are really powerful, and are made to trap people. If we don't invest, there is fear that we may be left out and social media makes us feel guilty when we hear the success stories. Many people are gullible, and this is one more reason why ads are generally stupid.
I wonder why people think that they can easily earn money out of thin air. May be these influencers & ads are the primary reason? May be we human make irrational decision when we see other people are earning too much wealth on cryptos/stocks? Yes, combination of luck & logic sometimes favor people, and they become successful. But as with everything in this world, people must also realize that 20% people controls maximum wealth.
Selling over time would not mitigate any part of the income tax liability
1) Progressive tax bracket caps out at ~500k. I expect Damon would be above this every year, rendering structuring irrelevant
2) capital gains tax would be zero upon receipt, so selling immediately should not trigger any new tax.
Why? If you get paid in bitcoin, the easiest for taxes is to sell immediately.
The value of the bitcoin at the time you receive them has to be declared as income anyway. If you sell little by little over time, you need to declare the income anyway + keep track of transactions for capital gains taxes.
Didn't he know that telling people to invest in these volatile is irresponsible?
Not so Will Hunting now - is it?
Wonder what he thinks now - that his name was used to scam people.
punish who exactly? an ad agency that took the job or influencer that took the job or an llc registered who knows where?
they should have known better is logical, but when you write something into law it's tricky to convey the spirit. Should an ad agency do due diligence on every product they advertise, even if they understand nothing about it?
In this case, the customer doesn’t think they are covered by SEC rules because they aren’t trading in securities. The claim being that crypto isn’t a security but rather a commodity, which have fewer regulatory restrictions. However, that’s all about to be tested in court at a massive scale.
Crypto companies are absolutely securities companies, so it’s just a a matter of time until the hammer comes down. I’m often cynical about the ability of government to crack down on businesses, but in this case it really feels like a lot of crypto folks are miles out over their skis in terms of the kinds of “mind games” they think they can play on the justice system.
Why not? This will cut down on scams and dubious products dramatically, a good thing in my opinion.
Before Bitcoin there was 'secret stock trading program that can make you millions!', a few of the scammers literally changed the name from stock trading to crypto trading with the same scam.
For anyone reading you should definitely read up on how these romance scams and finance scams work.
The main thing they try to do is create an emotional connection, because once you're emotionally involved it actually overrides your brains 'logical' side of things, as in emotion is in a different part of the brain and you'll ignore blatant logical issues when you're essentially in love or the deep end. It's interesting to read about at least.
And as another pointed out, this scam involved no actual crypto.
Yes, actually.
While a complete gift card ban is possibly not necessary, I do think there is a strong need to place legal limitations on their use and transferability to reduce or eliminate the degree to which they enable scammers.
Stores have done a little bit to try to combat this at the point of sale but it isn't nearly enough.
On the telephone side, I think we need to start holding phone companies liable if a spoofed number was used in a scam. It is ridiculous that they still haven't been able to solve that issue after years of effort and legistlation.
The Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security has means to enforce that kind of ban, like it has done in the past, and still does.
Banning it just ensures that law-abiding citizens can't use it for good while you solidify the market belongs to criminals. Who knows what the outcome for that will be, but if the war on drugs is any indicator, I'm not optimistic that would end up as a net positive for society.
While banning cryptocurrencies won't eliminate it, it would make it much less attractive for fraud, extortion and money laundering.
The war on drugs turned otherwise law abiding citizens into criminals. A ban on crypto wouldn't have the same effect nor would it have the effect of driving a behavior that should be treated as a mental health issue underground.
I am not sure a ban is the best solution, I am open to alternatives.
I can only think of Matt Damon's somewhat notorious Crypto.com commercial, which has been lampooned so many times. There are others, I'm sure.
The adds, at least the Matt Damon one, did have fine print disclaimers.
Half a year ago my mother asked me about crypto and how she could invest since she read about it online somewhere. I strongly opposed and explained to her why it wouldn't be wise.
Most people are just too prone to scam ads and such. It's really concerning.
What is the root of all this ridiculous finance? The stock market seems to be the most ridiculous thing that has been around so long that it's considered normal, but is our inflationary, high risk high reward economy really optimal for society? We're in a spot now where the wealth gap is staggering, yet 100% of the american billionaire classes net worth wouldn't even fund the federal government for a year.
Something seems very off about all of this and I suspect that's why we see the symptoms of otherwise intelligent people falling for money scams all the time. We've simply put way too much social energy into making finance complex and I worry that we're continuing down a wrong path by demanding more complex safeguards, insistent that we can solve the problems with policy.
I readily welcome the fact that all of this is so complex that I don't have a strong grasp on it though and with that my intuition isn't worth much, but the few people I've met that claim to have a firm grasp on our economic drivers haven't been able to make predictions worth anything noteworthy and that's worrying to me. If the most educated people you know in finances and markets are markedly under-performing compared to congress members, this complexity does not seem to be something benefiting the people it should be benefiting.
What does "social energy" mean here? Human intellectual effort? Finance represents the complexity of the economy and societies - it's basically a model for understanding and rationalizing the economic activity going on. It can definitely become unmoored from fundamentals, but then have a correction, though.
> and I worry that we're continuing down a wrong path by demanding more complex safeguards, insistent that we can solve the problems with policy.
What's the alternative? What is the non-policy tool? Let it run without safeguards until it destroys more of the financial security of average people?
That's what's happening in the crypto world now. Perhaps we don't regulate it and the examples in the article serve as warnings to others?
However, if we do that with the broader stock market, I suspect it'll exacerbate the wealth gap issue you lament, unless your idea is to accelerate toward an financial and societal collapse/reset, which comes with arguably worse side effects.
the most widely used cryptos either have fixed inflation or noteably no inflation with bitcoin.
These are merely a ton of correlations, but it's hard to imagine the wealth gap getting worse under a non-inflationary, trickle down economic model. The trickle down model might work with non-inflationary currency, but it seems obvious to me that it doesn't work in our current system where the bankers get the most value from the dollars its allowed to create and it loses value as it moves towards lower income pockets.
Trickle down economics has exacerbated the wealth gap, as demonstrated by large scale international retrospective studies of its effects [1]. Given that, it's hard to imagine how making things more trickle-down would improve the wealth gap.
1. https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/poverty/530731-...
I think a logical hypothesis is that it doesn't work to lessen wealth inequality is because first movers advantage. In an inflationary economy the first people to touch the money get the most value of it as it loses value over time. In a deflationary economy this would flip and I'd argue that's exactly what we need to happen. There is no such thing as someone who sits around hoarding wealth at a macro scale. This is made obvious by the fact that it takes roughly 3 generations for families to lose their wealth.
Sure, maybe the frugal entrepreneur holds or invests, but that person will die and give it to someone who values money less as they didn't earn it. They will likely spend the money and so-on until the money has been injected back into circulation, with each step of the way that money gains value, which means that money is worth the most when it reaches the producers/workers.
Inflationary trickle-down (AKA supply side) economic policy is exactly what we've had since the 1980s (even from the parties on the left), so I don't know what else it would be addressing. Before that we had inflationary demand side economics.
We've not had a significant deflationary period in the US, but Japan has, due in no small to their historical resistance to allowing immigration. It's not clear that the US can or should follow their model.
It seems like maybe a datapoint in favor of the hypothesis I presented, at least. I can't get past the WSJ paywall, though, unfortunately.
Her friends are apparently buying their crypto with the help of some "guy" because they don't know how to do it themselves. It sounds a bit scary, but it's their private matter.
My older brother has lost ten thousand dollars in the past year - I've begged him to stop but he won't listen. It's affecting his relationship with his girlfriend and he can't afford any of this.
He has no experience with computers outside of facebook, but all he does is talk about the next deflationary shitcoin that's gonna make him a millionaire, cause "when the supply shrinks it gets more valuable, like a rare collectible".
He's already asked for money to fill in some gaps.
Americans have a lot of the world's wealth, and at this scale there are more gullible people than any scammer knows what to do with. To most of the World's population that immense wealth is just the right phone call, text message, or email away from becoming yours.
That really isn’t true. Most people are fairly resistant to scam ads, or ask for and get good advice. But the scam ads are relentless and fast a wide net, they only need to catch a few victims to be profitable.
But then I had to talk my parents out of amway when I was a teenager. A lot of people are easily deluded by a bit of hope backed up by personal connections. That was really powerful stuff, I only hope all of that has moved to much easier to resist scam ads.
And people have fewer personal connections these days, which makes it even worse.
I can't even.
If something is promising you 500% returns or whatever, ask yourself why they aren't investing their marketing budget in their goldmine, ask yourself why are they trying to get you to invest.
Hard to call him a victim with a payday like that, but I think he'd be closer to victim than a charlatan.
His ability to charge $ for his celebrity comes from his image/reputation. He has access to paid professionals whose job is to safeguard and burnish his reputation.
Health and wealth, in particular, are sensitive subjects that are often the source of scams. If I type into Google, "is crypto a", the top autosuggest hits include "a ponzi scheme", "a pyramid scheme", "a bubble", "a scam". Clearly some folks have some concerns. There are editorials in mass market papers discussing whether crypto is a scam, and have been for several years.
If a celebrity still wants to lend their name to such a project, that's their choice, of course. And they might well have a good faith rationale to do so. And perhaps crypto is not a scam! But... it still seems to me that it's a risky proposition, and it should be evident to them and their PR team that it's a risky proposition. If it goes poorly, which it seems like it is, it's reasonable that people will conclude that Matt Damon preferred to make a bunch of money at the risk of other people's financial wellbeing. (And that's fine, too -- fortune favours the bold, after all.)
So the context of your discussion is misleading in 2 ways:
1) You're implying that OP has something to do with crypto investments. It doesn't.
2) You're implying that OP has something to do with celebrities endorsing crypto investments. It doesn't.
Addiction (or jail, depending on methods) favors the brave gamblers who pursuit "easy" fortunes. [1]
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160721-the-buzz-that-ke...
[2] https://theconversation.com/get-rich-or-die-trying-when-gamb...
https://www.marketplace.org/2022/06/09/when-a-cryptocurrency...
And
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/22/ukrainian...
Matt Levine put in succinctly: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-13/merger...
> If you don’t like the financial system making leveraged speculative bets with your deposits, you might find yourself putting your money in some entirely unregulated crypto bank whose entire purpose is to make leveraged speculative bets with your money
I hope there's a lot of court cases that ensures the morons that started these companies and peddled BS to the public don't have anything more to do with other peoples money.
Don't invest in something you don't understand.
I think you'll struggle to find many comparisons to short-lived hypes with cryptocurrency as a category.
A few do, most are completely worthless.
That really doesn't make cryptocurrencies look any better.
or any worse.
> If the former then they haven't gained anything yet
Any asset has risk, including fiat. So no, they did gain already. Or do you expect them to cash out to Bolivar?
Comparing bitcoins volatility to fiat is ridiculous but regardless, you haven't made any actual guaranteed monetary gains until you sell.
When I buy a house in Dubai with bitcoin, there is no fiat involved. I receive the house, they receive the bitcoin. Simple. You could call this selling your bitcoin, but in the same sense you could say selling your fiat.
You seem to think that fiat currency is somehow a base unit like meters. But it isn't. Maybe you have noticed the inflation all over the world recently, some countries more than others. Like I said before, all asset classes have risks. The statement "cashing out" makes no sense to me. I have various stores of my value. Fiat, crypto, companies, real estate, jewelry, bullets, ...
I'll bet you they didn't buy and pay for the materials for said house with bitcoin.
I don't really know what your point is now as you apparently view bullets as an asset class, so I've kind of lost your story. If you think you're going to make a much of money on bitcoin I'm not sure why you'd get rid of it. I invest in securities because I think it'll outperform the default choice, I don't invest in things that I think will under-perform it.
If you don't view bullets as an asset, you are definitely lost.
Here is a challenge: try to imagine a world where bullets are an asset. A world where an "asset" is:
An asset is a resource with economic value that an individual, corporation, or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide a future benefit. (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/asset.asp)
Maybe you should open your worldview a bit to see various ways on how you store value, not only the obvious financial instruments. But if you don't, no problem.
There's an implicit phase change in this system: solid to gas. It'll sublime like dry ice in a moment, when bitcoin block is priced at its transaction processing fees.
When this all disappears, nothing of value will remain.
> By 1635, a sale of 40 bulbs for 100,000 florins (also known as Dutch guilders) was recorded. By way of comparison... , a skilled laborer might earn 150–350 florins a year.
What do 40 bitcoins go for now? About 1 mil USD. What's that compared to an average salary? Only 20x. Much less than the 300x of some tulips
I think the more people actually "take the bullshit seriously", it'll be like trying to take the emperor's new clothes and sell them at your local discount store.
Ie., there is no actual use case for any of this. Its only useful insofar as it exists as a ponzi asset (ie., it only has value because other people want it because other people want it... because other people want it...).
It doesnt actually solve any problems.. so the more a recession deflates bubbles, the more that businesses/projects/etc. will need to show actual economic value to survive.
Bitcoin has a "marginal productive value" in something, i'd say, c. 100 USD region. As in, the slow, largely useless, bitcoin transaction network provides the service of "publically, reliably, slowly" processing a block of transactions between parties.
How much value does that have? AS A SERVICE, really... almost none.
You could create a better competitor service tomorrow, and charge much less to use it (hence: all the other coins).
Crypto isnt like gold: there isnt a limited supply. You can just create more coins: doge, eth, etc. THere's an infinite supply of self-liming coin systems. It's trivial to create a competitor service.
So think about bitcoin as an actual product: trivial to out-compete, provides basically no useful service, horrifically slow. As a business model, its DOA.
There is a much stronger guarantee that there is limited bitcoin when compared to gold. We have no idea what tech advancements will allow mining gold from comets or neighboring planets. A bit more far fetched, but maybe not impossible in the future would be changing other elements into gold.
Bitcoin has a codified contract that is being upheld socially with vast amounts of resources proving that society agrees on the limited supply. Sure, you can fork the codebase and create another chain. That has happened many times, which just proves a new chain does not do anything to the agreed upon, codified, limited supply of bitcoin.
As for your other points, they're presented constantly as serious arguments and debated ad-nauseam. Either you've just not witnessed it, or you're just trying to present things as uncontested facts which appears disingenuous and does not strike me as an honest argument.
Either bitcoin is a deflationary currency, in which case it repeats the servre financial crises of the 19th C. and early 20th C. in which an economy is imprisoned into a rate of inflation set by blind non-economic forces. In which, as an economy, is horrifying: consumer protection is impossible by design, the owners are the controllers (feudalism), it's entirely public (so you're entire economic life is available to be profiled by used by others), etc.
Or its an asset. If it's an asset its a ponzi scheme.
It's clearly mostly being held as an asset, and traded as an asset by criminals and dictators because it has some ponzi-value. This ponzi-value will disappear as soon as anyone actually tries to use this as a serious currency, as with someone planting a tulip bulb for the flowers... no one wants tulip flowers (lol).
No one wants an incredibly deflationary economic system, controlled by the holders of coins, forked on behalf of the landed gentry, with one's private economic history plastered across the whole internet, with incredibly slow transactions, with immutable histories, and so on.
As soon as anyone actually "plants the tulip bulb" crypto is, quite seriously, f*ked. No one wants tulips. If I were holding crypto the last thing I'd do is actually try to get any one to take is seriously as a currency.
The number of delusional far-right libertarians who dream of being feudal lords is the c.5% of young angry men it's always been. And likewise, if they ever achieved anything, the state would put a stop to that immediately. No one wants your tulips. But i'd just love to see you plant them!
Go, run something on bitcoin, you'd wipe crypto off the map over night.
That's an odd argument for a crypto-bro. A bunch of national currencies have failed due to poor financial policies.
let's all do our best not to turn hacker news into yet another platform for ad-hominem flamewars
Edit: I though "crypto-bro" is just a short hand for "ardent cryptocurrency supporter". Does it have some other negative meaning/connotation that I am not aware of?
> A nerd with too much spare time and video cards. Thinks he is smarter than you because he buys and resells burnt forests. Will ignore any meaningful arguments against what he does by repeating something about "serious business" 1000 times.
for that matter, the '-bro' suffix is almost exclusively used as an insult
Are you willing to say by which date it will happen?
It is not the same kind potential lottery win as stock picking the winner, but you also will not bit hit as hard.
This is the lesson that must be learned, not only with investing in crypto, but investing in anything.
1. This was an outright scam with the money going nowhere except into the scammer's pocket.
2. The two celebrities were not endorsing this. The scammers unlawfully used fake testimonials with their faces on them.
3. Again, it was a scam. An illegal scam by criminals where they robbed people. Even if you think crypto is a Ponzi scheme this is on a whole other level. It's like commenting "banks are crooks" on an article about scammers pretending to be your bank.
He should have invested in legitimate establishment schemes. Like penny stocks. Or become a Lloyds 'name'. Or put his money into a managed commodities portfolio. Or certain hedge funds. Etc, etc.
Or if he wanted 'extraordinary' returns he could have gone with a forex HYIP, or even a commission for helping recover frozen funds for African dignitaries. Etc, etc.
There will always be confidence scams, as long as there are humans.
To me, this feels a lot more widespread than things like typical pyramid schemes. Celebrities doing cryptocurrency commercials, baseball umpires being sponsored by cyrptocurrency exchanges, crypto machines in the grocery store. It's nuts.
Personally I think these con-artist scams are more widespread than typical pyramid schemes. But perhaps that's just selection bias on my part, because of the folk I know and the media I consume.
Maybe, but the question is more about which rate of a population will be exposed to such a risk. With proper politics, you can definitely limit these risks for the general public.
Start small and harmless, take a small payment, request higher access, get a screen share or account password. Game over.
HN: bridges are a scam!
The difference between that and a crypto scam is obvious to me, or at least it has been so far. But that is because I chose to put a lot of work into understanding all this stuff. Not everyone has; that should not cost them their life’s savings.
Some were conned into thinking that this time, the grift would work for them.
This is why they say "you can't cheat an honest man"
W. C. Fields was joking when he wrote that line. His con man character, when caught, was attempting to blame his mark for having been cheated.
https://www.quora.com/What-does-you-cant-cheat-an-honest-man...
> Grifters/con men often prey on people who want to make a quick/easy buck
Thank your luck but don't blame others for their bad luck.
Six figures "invested" in cryptocurrency speculation without even informing his partner?
I have real trouble relating to these kinds of people.
> "It started just over a year ago. I noticed an ad that was endorsed by two well-known celebrities showing you could earn more money than you could earn in a bank," he said.
God damn it, capitalism strikes again!
It’s the reinforcing feedback loop that I found striking.
> That initial investment gave a good return and the company had its own website and even assigned a personal client manager, with all dealings done over the phone, not online.
The scam was a fake cryptocurrency exchange/trading platform that looked like a real one with accounts, balances and prices for the various tokens.
So far more than a guys who said "cryptocurrency" a couple of times on the phone.
Cryptocurrencies aren't used to work around any regulations here, but just as an alternative lure instead of "FOREX" or "binary options".
"rules around finance" can do nothing to protect people from outright scams like this https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/fake-broker-deale...
https://londonlovesbusiness.com/60-per-cent-of-uk-investors-...
Currently:
-50% in a company paid insurance where, from the options I have a available, it is placed in an index fund investing primarily in my own country.
-20% in a generic global index fund
-15% in a commodity-indexed fund
-15% in cash, as liquidity and in case the stock market crashes completely
That's a redundancy.
buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems
Also, uBiome was a YC backed scam. As crowdfunding becomes more popular it's possible YC backed companies will lead to retail losses. There are many YC companies that have raised on WeFunder.
Everyone is vulnerable. It's not just crypto.
That's the truly educational take.
Many will jump the crypto hate wagon. I hate fraud and fraudsters. But the reality is crypto is just another excuse for the to defraud people.
Interestingly, the same BBC article features links to other two frauds in contexts totally unrelated to crypto:
Romance scam: NI woman swindled out of £112,000 life savings [1]
International students in NI scammed out of £105,000 [2]
Firstly, 'Reality TV' has become influencer culture. A lot of social media is you being bombarded with "look how great my life is" pictures. The newest sneakers, handbags, fancy cars, fancy watches. Young people with possessions. "This is what a good life is, this is what you could have." We spend a lot more time on social media than we did watching the TV.
Secondly, we keep being told that 9-5 jobs are for suckers. That's what your parents did. Why work in an office for peanuts when those people you follow on Instagram get paid to dress up and take photos and go on fancy holidays? Every week there's an article about someone making 500k a month on OnlyFans, etc etc.
Thirdly, a bunch of people have got wildly rich from cryptocurrency by being in the right place at the right time. Almost zero effort. You read about these people, and then you talk to your friends. Some of your friends tell you they've made 5 or 6k from a $500 investment in a coin with a dog's head on it and how easy it was.
So now you have a large group of people who spent a long time on social media, don't want to work a 'proper' job but want to be rich and have the life that goes with it. They hear the stories about people who have actually got rich from crypto, quickly get caught up in Cryptotwitter (with the I've got $500 in bitcoin "have fun staying poor" folks telling them to get on the rocketship or miss out) and are now absolutely primed for the 'next Dogecoin' so they can get money for nothing.
Of course the romance or student scams can happen, people will always fall for scams. But right now the crypto scam space has got to be like shooting fish in a barrel. It's like the get-rich-quick schemes we've alway had but on steroids.
I was traveling long before the pandemic and there's a lot of energy that comes with this kind of freedom. It struck me so hard the first time I experienced it. The ability to buy a plane ticket and change your surroundings. I didn't inform my employer. I just did it.
To your point, I think it's easier to compare how good other people have it compared to you. Now I know some people claim it's all fake and not the life one would really want. I agree with that. Traveling can be isolating and depressing. You're away from your family and friends and the local expat population leaves a lot to be desired. But you're still living an exciting life and exploring the world. That's worth something.
Is this actually true? When I was a kid, the amount of TV time was something of a moral panic; I'd have a hard time believing there were many more hours in the day left to consume. What I would believe is that social media's use of intermittent rewards makes people obsess about it even when they aren't actively using it.
The rewards are the icing on an all-inclusive cake.
What you need is widespread magical thinking combined with greed, corruption and an economic shock.
"Albania became one of the most enthusiastic implementers of shock therapy, a set of policies that included the liberalization of markets, strict monetary policy, and privatization of public services and infrastructure."
"Factory closures and unemployment soon followed. Inflation and currency devaluations wiped out savings and welfare entitlements."
"Politically connected businessmen appropriated the profitable parts of state assets in an upward redistribution of wealth of world-historic proportions. Food subsidies were slashed; hunger rose."
Citizens regarded capitalism "with childlike naivete—and grown-up greed"
Albania "became a playground for Moonies, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses."
In Albania a vicious civil war followed the collapse of the pyramids.
Many parallels to the United States in 2022 (and this is far bigger than just crypto).
Source: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/pyramids-eve...
Modern consumers tend to use some other screen at least part of the time they're watching television.
Before, TV used to be dependent on the content being broadcast, and so there was something of a hard constraint upon the amount of TV time - especially for children. This has gone completely out the window in recent years.
They could have been doing research into all the actual non-stranger cases of abuse that were going on but secret, but no, that doesn't sell as well.
Now? We're all playing Eve Online IRL: https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Scams_in_EVE_Online
https://www.pcmag.com/news/ftc-sues-dating-site-over-fake-pr...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/09/...
Crypto is a fantastic technology for people who want to rid themselves of those regulations, so that they can repeat all those scams that were made impossible for banks or other financial companies.
For instance, when Celsius offers interest rates of 18%, people should understand that something is wrong. My understanding is that regulators had started making demands, but it seems clear that collateral requirements for lending had dramatically underestmated the currency risk.
This is the Morgage Backed Securities scandal of today. If it is too good to be true, it is not true.
They intentionally did the harder thing that made it the illegal thing!
This article is about the usual options/forex/cryptocurrency brokerage scam, where a fake brokerage takes your money to trade on their fake trading platform.
So yeah, the scam doesn't involve actual cryptocurrency purchases.
Someone casually reading this thread might think Sam Altman had something to do with the scam reported in OP. Please stop spreading disinformation.
> The company had asked him for extra money as an insurance on his investment.
This person is beyond stupid.
Crypto should be the same.
Though I’m interested, what is the value we gain in return for not prosecuting scammers?
And I didn't say you shouldn't prosecute the scammers. I just said idiots losing money to scams isn't a reason to police what people are allowed to do with their own money.
So either you give people zero choice or you accept cases like this will happen.
That doesn't mean you don't try to minimise it or don't prosecute people or whatever.
ding