It is too late to get into crypto?
I mean, who wants to miss out on the chance to get uber-rich?
Or maybe get into NFTs, even though I can’t wrap my head around blockchain, fungability, Bitcoin, and the like.
Is this anything like Nabob coupons? I have lots of those.
From what I can gather, it all comes down to enough people agreeing that an image, article, or ‘artwork’ has a high value.
I have that already – in my wallet are works of art made from polymer that are green and purple and blue and occasionally sepia with pretty sparkly clear strips, numbers, and pictures of famous people or animals.
It’s fun to listen to the young and young-at-heart speak excitedly about the new must-have, must-do trend that they’ve discovered, with no knowledge that it’s simply the return of something humanity has seen before (think record albums), and that scams are nothing new (think liver pills, snake oil salesmen, and chain letters).
Okay, so if I dump every cent into all this digital high finance, how soon until I’m – as the kids say – bougie, bailing, or minted?
Time for some research.
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC) and the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) have been warning Canadians about crypto scams for a few years now. In 2024, they sounded the alarm about the growing number of ‘romance scams’ that involve a technique called “pig butchering.” That’s when scammers groom a person over an extended period, often implying a romantic relationship, to convince them to “invest” in crypto only to steal their money.
It’s not just rubes uneducated about these new, unregulated digital currencies that get taken.
News reports by the likes of CBS, the BBC, The Guardian, and more: Binance hacked with $6.4 billion US worth of crypto stolen on Nov. 1 by hackers, prompting users to withdraw $3.2 billion US from the world’s biggest crypto exchange.
It’s interesting that crypto types have to give cryptocurrency value equivalent to actual dollars, almost as if it has no real value. Why is the term “scam” coming to mind?
