Sorry/Not Sorry

Cryptocurrency investing. Elon Musk impersonators. Dogecoin. This has got to be as near to perfect a scam story as they come. All that's missing is the Nigerian prince.

Anyway: 

Since October 2020, consumers have reported losing more than $80 million to crypto-investment scams, according to the federal agency. Many of the schemes promised that a celebrity associated with cryptocurrency would multiply and return any coins the consumer sent to their digital wallet. The losses to Elon Musk impersonators alone have exceeded $2 million. (Source: Bloomberg)

Gee, who would have thunk that it turns out that there are no crypto-celebs that are going to miraculously multiply your bitcoins and get them back to your digital wallet? 

And what, exactly, does an Elon Musk impersonator do to
convince a person (a mark? a dupe? a sucker?) that he's the

real Elon Musk? Act like a weirdball? Talk about his Tesla? Talk about cryptocurrency? Talk about buying a Tesla using cryptocurrency (which you actually can do)?

Anyway, a number of those who've been scammed by the fake Elon Musks of the world are looking to the FTC to help them get their money back. 

Good, ahhhh, luck with that.

Such ruses had already been going on for years when Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, hosted NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” earlier this month -- raising interest in crypto and making it even easier for crooks to find people to dupe.

I didn't see Musk on SNL, but I can only imagine.  Here's what some of those who've been taken are saying:

* “Fake tweet looking like Elon Musk. Said, in celebration of lunch today, send 1 Bitcoin, get ten back. So I sent one valued at $53,500. I have photos of everything.”

Okay, you have a bitcoin "valued at $53,500," - backed by "a photo and everything". I'm assuming  - or maybe just hoping - that this schnook paid a lot less for it, and saw it wondrously multiply to get to that $53.5K value. Maybe multiply enough so that getting their bitcoin to increase overnight by an order of magnitude seemed plausible. But seriously, where do we get people like this? 

Somehow, they got dazzled into dabbling with bitcoin - probably not even having anything other than the most rudimentary understanding of what cryptocurrency is and how it works - and all of a sudden they think they're the Winklevoss twins who, having been awarded mere chump change for their role in Facebook, decided to get into the wonderful world of crypto. (That damned Zuckerberg may have screwed us out of Facebook, but we'll show him! We'll turn ourselves into billionaires the new-fashioned way, with an even crazier scheme than FB.)

* “I foolishly thought there was a promotional giveaway being conducted by Saturday Night Live to support Elon Musk’s debut to host the show. I went to SNLMUSK.com and sent 30,000 dogecoins that was supposed to be multiplied by 10 and returned. Please help. The transfer was sent to the following address...”

"Foolishly" is certainly a reasonably good word choice here, that's for sure. As for dogecoin, it's a cryptocurrency created as a joke back in 2013 by a couple of software engineers. They took a few hours to set things up, and things took off from there. Doge has its ups and downs, but the company - thin air, if ever - was valued, when last I looked, at about $50B. 

* “This was a Twitter scam with someone pretending to be Elon Musk. Used same icon and had the blue, circle checkmark verification.”

Because no one with larceny in their heart would ever, ever, ever in a million years have the audacity to use a fake Twitter blue check. The blue check, by the way, is granted by Twitter to users that they verify as being "real." To get verified you have to be somewhat prominent in your field (even if your field is "famous for being famous") or have a notable and active presence on Twitter. As opposed to a real or fake Twitter nobody. (I fall into the real Twitter nobody category, by the way. @MaureenRogers49)

“There’s so much hype about the increase in value,” Emma Fletcher, a program analyst at the FTC, said in an interview. “People don’t want to miss out, and scammers want to take advantage of the information gap between their knowledge and the enthusiasm about cryptocurrency.”

All I can say is that I have precious little sympathy for someone who thinks they can increase an investment tenfold overnight. "Information gap between their knowledge and the enthusiasm about cryptocurrency" tells us pretty much all we need to know about those who got suckered on this play. I'd wager that there's more than just one sucker born every day, and a lot of them get drawn into 'get rich quick' schemes. 

What's the saying about something that sounds too good to be true?

Sorry that some people have to learn the hard way, but in the Age of Google, when you can quickly search on whether a scam's a scam,  what I mostly feel is Not Sorry. (And I'm not sorry about that in the least.)