While watching Bitconned, the documentary on Netflix, about a cryptocurrency scam, I had to stop it to double-check I wasn’t watching a mockumentary. Everything about it seemed to preposterous to be based on a true-crime case. But it’s the real deal Holyfield.
Centra Tech was a cryptocurrency formed in south Florida in the 2010s by a group of hustlers who were good with photoshop and selling people on the next big technical deal that it really didn’t matter that it was all fake – at first. It looked like it could be real and very profitable. But what the hell is cryptocurrency and how does it work? I don’t know. Neither did Ray Trapani, Robert Farkas and Sam “Sorbee” Sharma, the masterminds behind Centra.
Money, itself, exists only because we say it does. We attached value to gold and silver centuries ago because greed made us want something that others didn’t. It didn’t matter that in the 20th Century, we were taken off the gold standard, because it was just something we assigned value like diamonds. Remember that DuckTales episode where they use bottle caps as currency on that isolated island. Or in The Gods Must be Crazy, a glass Coke bottle becomes a prized possession against the bushpeople who have no concept of monetary value because they initially view everything as belonging to one and all. That is why they are so quick to get rid of it when it resorts to fighting and arguments.
Trapani seems like he idolizes Goodfellas‘ Henry Hill as he says “Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be a criminal.” He was into it because cryptocurrency wasn’t regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, so it was like anybody’s game. They go about creating a fake website and even searching the web for an “old white guy” who could be their CEO, because they didn’t think investors would be interested in a bunch of young men. The CEO was named Michael Edwards and he was basically unavailable.
However, the face of Michael Edwards was actually Andrew Halayko, a professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada who had absolutely no idea he had been used. He had no connection of Centra Tech. And the documentary has this mild-mannered man actually reading a fake obituary that Trapani, Sharma and Robert Farkas drummed up when too many people began to ask too many questions. And then they just had one of their grandfathers be the next CEO.
I don’t want to reveal too much because this documentary directed by Bryan Storkel makes you wonder how so many people could believe it was real. It’s hard to put in words how these people act all nonchalantly. I think you can look at the last 25-30 years of technology to fully understand why so many people who had a limited understanding of technology and a large bank account would throw money at something others would have questioned. That’s how Elizabeth Holmes got so many people to believe that Theranos was going to be the next medical advancement. It was a fear of missing out.
History is full of rich investors who laughed at young innovators and struggling businesspeople only to turn around and beg for them to return phone calls once they became rich and famous. It’s best to get in on the ground floor or not at all. They were even able to get Floyd Mayweather Jr. and DJ Khaled to do endorsements by saying they had crypto cards through Visa. Except, they didn’t have a partnership through Visa.
Yet it was all one big scam. Still people believed the flashiness of the hustlers at first. Centra Tech claimed to have an executive board of Harvard graduates. But that just seems too good to be true. You really don’t have to understand the cryptocurrency concept and it’s all one big crap shoot as Ned Ryerson said. This is more about the narcissism of people who are willing to take all of whatever is there and the hell with all the rest.
You can tell from those around Trapani who support him that “he can do no wrong.” I’m reminded of something my brother told me when he was in the seventh grade. A fellow classmate of his had her boyfriend break up with her. The girl’s mother had school officials on alert because the word was she was going to come down and beat up her daughter’s ex-boyfriend. And this was 35 years ago when anyone could walk on a school ground without people causing concern. And maybe it’s because Trapani knows that those around him will back him up always no matter how awful he is explains why he behaves the way he does. He always thinks he can cut a deal or work his way out of something.
That is probably why he cut a deal to throw Sharma and Farkas under the bus while they went to prison and he got a slap on the wrist ordered to pay back millions. Yet the documentary indicates he has since bought a new house. I feel we haven’t heard the last of Trapani just like Billy McFarland of the Fyre Festival scandal or con artist Anna Sorokin. Maybe our justice systems love these scammers more and feels they deserve another chance. At the same time, people want store clerks to shoot shoplifters. It says a lot about our society and why we allow this to keep happening.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 