Crypto Scammers Have Stolen Billions From American Consumers

Americans lost more than $5 billion dollars in crypto currency scams last year alone, as scammers become develop more sophisticated ways to take advantage of consumers. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Americans lost more than $5 billion in cryptocurrency scams last year alone, as scammers develop more sophistication in the way that they take advantage of consumers. Wow. I mean, every time one of these stories come up, we find out that this scammer stole $18 billion from people, and everybody looks at that and says, well, okay, but it's a good idea because it's something new. It's crypto. It must be. Anyway, pick it up.

Yeah. The problem with crypto is that you've got a very large market that is very largely not regulated. And that's not to say that, okay, then crypto itself is evil. It can be fine. But the problem is, due to the lack of regulations, you have scammers, according to this new FBI report that are going out there, and actually it's very sophisticated. It's almost like a human trafficking case.

Yeah. It is very much.

What they do is they'll go on dating sites and they will match up with people, go out with somebody a few times and gain their trust and then say, hey, have you ever thought about crypto? I've actually got this company here. It'd be great if you could invest in it. And the person, because they've built the trust, will say, okay, I'll give you 10, $15,000 here. And then they'll pay 'em back a little in the early days and say, oh, look, you're making tons of money here. And then they disappear with all the money and they'll put it in another scheme or have another group reach out to them saying, hey, we can handle your crypto. Give us a little bit more money to recoup whatever they had given them.

Well, that's right. In other words, there's two parts to the scam. First, steal the money, then bring in the, I'm gonna go get your money for you. I'm gonna get it back and steal more money. You know what I did? I gotta tell you. I put, I wanted to understand this, I put not a big amount of money, just I wanted to understand how fraudulent this whole thing has potential to be. Now, granted, there may be some crypto companies that are legit and they're trying, and they're trying to play by the game. I don't know how you play by the game with something that you can't see or touch or even know where the hell it is. Maybe there's a way to do it, so I experimented, I put money in and exactly what I thought would happen happened. Money disappeared and nobody knows what the hell, you know, you just lost $15,000 somewhere. But the point being, I don't know that this is gonna make a breakthrough. What do you think? You got Trump out there. He's the pro-crypto guy.

Well, he just launched a new crypto company recently too. And, okay, if you're talking about scammers here, uh-oh, I would definitely not want to go anywhere near that one. But it's very difficult, again, like you said, when you're dealing with something that you cannot see, something that does not exist, something that is very unregulated, and granted the stock market also is not something you can see and feel.

No.

However, it is so tightly regulated that when a slight anomaly happens, they'll shut it all down and figure it out.

Americans have been duped out of $6 billion.

In one year.

One year, $6 billion, they have completely, utterly lost in one year.