Comment by frereubu
2 days ago
> I am sure he "saw" real returns on a very real looking app or website.
Exactly: "Hanes told Mitchell a confusing story. Not long ago, Hanes explained, he started investing in cryptocurrencies with the help of some people he met online. First, he and his partners deposited money on a reputable U.S. platform for buying and selling crypto. The profits were enormous, he said: He took out his phone to show Mitchell his account balance, which seemed to indicate that the investment was worth $40 million."
And frankly, that's an entirely reasonable result for having invested in Bitcoin at any number of times, which was also by all reasonable measures a bad idea. I think even people who support the existence and value of crypto would agree that Bitcoin winners are most like stock-lottery winners than particularly savvy investors.
Crypto is great for scams even beyond it's infrastructural advantages because a lot of people made a ton of money from investing money they couldn't afford to lose in things that were pretty indistinguishable from the actual scams.
The difference between a real crypto exchange and a scam crypto exchange is that you can actually withdraw your cryptocurrency from the exchange.
This nuance lost on the common cryptocurrency speculator given that they have no idea what cryptocurrency actually is or how it's supposed to work.
You might be able to do withdrawals on a scam exchange, and they might even hit your bank account.
The difference is that once the withdrawals become big enough, the exchange will start erroring out (or hit an account limit) and your friendly associate will vanish into the night.