Cheats and scammers are always around, from the dude who fills copper pipe with sand then beats the ends together, to the dude who has a punch with sterling silver mark to mark silver plate as sterling, to the refiner who adulterates his custom collector bars with base metals: there are always people out to scam. Nothing much has changed since the horse and buggy days when gold bricks and fake gold mining stocks were the big item. I don't know what scams involved the super wealthy, just the ones who lived on selling dollar scams.
There is a new one I only encountered a few days ago, although it has been around for over a year and involves crypto (you could always bite a silver or gold coin to see if it was real, but how do you bite a crypto before it bites you. This post is not political, although it references a scam that uses Elon Musk and Donald Trump deepfakes as its selling point.
The Scam attaches itself to a YouTube video of a known morning news and commentary show. For all intents and out of tents you are watching the bonafide full program, but you are getting the six or seven oclock version while the early 5 oclock version is still being live on your regular TV news, instead of you tube.
And then, and then, and then, you better start looking for Jones to come save you.
You will see a "Trump" standing at a podium monotonously reading a script with a NATO banner behind him, and an OTAN companion banner. In the monologue, the Trump is droning on about how much crypto the US has and he is going to make everybody rich and share his/American crypto with everyone. Just scan the code and transfer part or all of your own crypto to them, and instantly they will double the amount you have transferred to them (not sure they put it that way, more like they will double the amount with informing you you no longer own it, that it has been switched to them. Of course, it is a scam, once they have your account info. There is no such organization, although the Trump family is involved with a crypto outfit somewhere overseas. Again, no politics intended or implied. Just a caution that most of us will do better selling real scrap to boardsort rather than getting rich quick in crypto. Anyone who has better understanding of this scam, feel free to correct or explain my version.
I intend to contact the local TV affiliate station about this hijacking of their content with the deepfake attached.

Ponzi schemes have been a thing with crypto pretty much the entire time crypto has been around. I remember websites and ads on faucets for doubling your crypto. Think some of the early ones even worked for awhile until of course the ponzi ran out of steam. I had fun with the drip drip of the faucets for awhile, since I didn't mine or buy the btc I could afford to have fun with the different things. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

The fastest way to be safe[er] is to use a reputable exchange. Kraken, Coinbase, etc.

Stable coins on reputable exchanges tend to be safe, and are semi-regulated.
Non-stable standard coins and tokens are gambling, period.


Don’t miss that blockchain has changed the world on the backend though.
Banks use it for contract management and records keeping. AI uses it to record faults and “learn” from it.

And there’s the estimated 10% of the surface internet that’s hosted on filecoin and derivatives. A large chunk of modern online Distributed file systems are based on blockchain contracting.

Bitcoin was an attempt at anarchic utopian transactions. And many more are nothing beyond pump and dump legal theft.
But the underlying tech has changed computing forever.

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