Crypto victims - sorry, not sorry

Don't expect sympathy if you put your savings into cryptocurrency

Image by Google’s Gemini AI

In the early hours of Monday morning I read and listened to two excellent pieces about cryptocurrency, each featuring a hapless couple who had lost their life savings to criminals. The BBC’s Joe Tidy has been investigating the soaring levels of crime against holders of crypto, who now face attacks from both hackers and violent criminals who will use force to extract passwords from their victims.

Anne Applebaum’s podcast Autocracy in America was even more terrifying in an episode about the Trump administration’s determination to deregulate crypto and use it to enrich the President and his cronies. Top of the charge sheet, the creation of World Liberty Financial by Trump and his sons to mint crypto coins which appear to have just one function - they allow people to curry favour with the President in exchange for hard cash. One foreign national, Justin Sun, who would not be allowed to make campaign contributions to any US politician, invested $75 million in World Liberty tokens. As if by magic, a civil fraud lawsuit brought against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission was suddenly paused.

Joe Tidy’s piece features ‘Helen’, a personal assistant and ‘Richard’, a composer (not their real names) who invested much of their money, including the proceeds of the sale of a parent’s house, into a coin called Cardano. One day they found that they had been hacked with a sum of around £250,000 gone from their crypto wallet.

The Anne Applebaum podcast begins with the tale of Brandon LaRoque (real name), a bar owner from North Carolina, whose crypto coin of choice was XRP, sometimes known as Ripple. When the hackers came for his wallet, he lost $3 million and does not mind admitting that he was in tears when he told his wife their saving and dreams of a contented future were gone.

I suppose we are meant to feel sorry for these people - that’s how these stories of financial scams work, drawing readers and listeners in and creating righteous anger that “little people” have been wronged and deserve recompense.

But I’m struggling to sympathise. The whole point of crypto is that you are promised fabulous returns on a highly risky investment. Now the risk of the investment going wrong has been compounded by the fact that an unregulated industry is proving highly attractive to criminals who are after your winnings at the crypto casino.

I am particularly unmoved by Brandon’s predicament. He chose crypto because he doesn’t trust the banks - which he now admits would have done a much better job of getting his money back. He is also a Trump voter and now says if he had the President’s ear he’d like to “ask him to please work with Congress and make crypto safer and easier for everyone.”

At which point I found myself suffering an uncontrollable fit of the giggles. Brandon, don’t you see? Like most of the big players in crypto, your President wants to make it easier for everyone to get involved, which means more mugs to be deprived of their savings, but not safer - which means lots of costly regulation.

The more I see of the cryptocurrency scene, the more I am convinced that it really has only one use case, criminality. What the industry obviously needs is a marketing campaign to improve its image. So I have an idea for a catchy slogan and the ideal face to front the campaign - Crypto: As Trustworthy as Trump.