Ray Trapani always wanted to be a criminal, as he tells us at the beginning Bitconid, a documentary now streaming on Netflix about the Centra Tech scam. His interests include illegal drugs, nice suits, gambling, and luxury cars. His inspiration was his grandfather, who he says was a member of the Mafia. (His grandmother, who looks stunning in leopard print and a statement belt, rejects this claim; his mother says she saw bags full of cash.) He's obviously from Florida.
Time flies in the world of cryptocurrencies, so I'm not sure many people remember the Centra Tech scandal. Bitconid — which, despite its title, has little to do with Bitcoin — takes place during the ICO boom of the late 2010s, a period that many crypto newcomers may not remember. It's blow after blow of a scam, told by a scammer. Anyone seriously considering investing in cryptocurrencies should watch it, because scams have not gone away, they have become more sophisticated.
Trapani, the narrator, began his first business as a teenager dealing OxyContin with counterfeit prescriptions and an accomplice named Andrew Aguirre. Trapani describes the severity of the crime, saying, “It's always a great feeling when you get to that first mark.” It didn't last. Trapani was stopped, and police found a bottle of Oxy that did not bear his name. Trapani immediately turned, annoying his comrades. Aguirre got into trouble. Trapani hostel. This is called forecasting.
It becomes clear very early on Bitconid Ray Trapani's first love is money and his second love is himself. On screen, he is undeniably charismatic, as narcissists often are. And you can tell he's having a good time – because in order to break up the monotonous interviews required for this type of documentary, director Brian Sterkel shows Trapani driving a luxury car or wearing a suit. It's a clever way to make these interviews more visually interesting and one that also clearly fits with Trapani's view of himself.
“It was very easy to do.”
Trapani made the money through a legitimate luxury car rental company called Miami Exotics, which he enticed his family to invest in. (He also got them to sign for loans.) But that wasn't enough. He and his partners were spending that money on exactly what you might imagine: nightlife; Holidays in the Bahamas. the shopping; gambling; In one case, a dog was worth $2,000. And most worryingly, Somebody – Business partner Sam “Surbhi” Sharma, though he denies this in a statement – may have been writing the checks “to cash” and relieving the company of its funds. Trapani found out and spent the remaining money gambling all night. He attempted suicide by taking an overdose of pills. he lived. Then he turned to cryptocurrencies.
In Trapani's telling, he was victimized and betrayed by Sharma. But Sharma came up with an exciting new idea: pretend to make a debit card that would allow people to spend cryptocurrencies directly and then get the proceeds. Trapani didn't really know anything about cryptocurrencies. But it was 2017, and the mania around initial coin offerings began. Why even bother coming up with your own crypto business when you can steal someone else's?
“It was very easy to do,” Trapani says, sounding almost proud of himself. He and Sharma set up LinkedIn pages, claiming to have gone to Harvard. They found a company called TenX that promises a debit card that allows people to spend cryptocurrencies directly in the real world. They then hired Upwork freelancers to steal the entire idea, by taking their website and replacing all the references to TenX with Centra, including a photoshopped image of a Centra card with a Visa logo. They even created a CEO by Googling images of the “old white man” that came up.
Obviously the card wasn't there, and the trick was very simple. But as Bitconid Driving home, there were so many signs that it didn't matter to them. The connotations were good enough for early investor Jacob Renssel, for example, who introduced himself by saying he had made very good investments in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Of course, any Mark goes out of his way to say he's not stupid, and maybe Rensel isn't either – just greedy. This is why he became interested in cryptocurrencies in the first place.
It's not clear to me why people trust celebrity endorsements, but as Oprah can tell you, they do
Then there was the influencer Clif High, which is probably the reason the scam got any real traction. (High's YouTube channel suggests guys sunbathe their balls. Oh!) High promoted Centra to his followers because he literally misunderstood what it was: he relied on Mining data To make summaries of articles, and for him Technology has overwhelmed Centra Tech, a scam with a real bank, Centra Credit Union. actual Bank Issuing a crypto debit card would have been a big deal. This show gave Centra Tech money to get endorsements from DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather — and it's not clear to me why people trust celebrity endorsements, but as Oprah can tell you, they do.
Even critics of the scam may have gotten in on the game eventually. One of my favorite parts of the documentary is scammers complaining that people are “spreading FUD,” which stands for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.” It was great to hear one of Centra Tech's scammers, Robert Farkas, complain about “trolls” in chats, and shamelessly tell the truth. Farkas bragged about making them believers – which Trapani says they did by paying them money.
The scam broke, as scams do. Nathaniel Popper in New York times He was instrumental in uncovering this – and, as he explains, just a simple click led to the collapse of the Sentra story. Anyone familiar with highly educated people would be skeptical just listening to Sharma speak. (Part of the point is learning how to confidently speak the language of power; Sharma, Farkas, and Trapani clearly do not.) The absent CEO should have served as evidence. When Renssel became suspicious, all it took was a search of Trapani's Instagram account to confirm that he had been lied to.
Part of the joy Bitconid That's the way this story is told. It is surprising how much they rely on trust and intermediaries. Clif High relied on its small automations without checking them again. His subscribers relied on Clif High without checking it again. Investors relied on the Visa logo without double-checking it, and on LinkedIn resumes without double-checking it.
The director doesn't seem to notice that he's fallen for Trapani's charisma either
But this story is not told from the journalist's point of view. It was narrated by Trapani, who cooperated with the feds to arrest his co-conspirators. Parts of the documentary were clearly filmed before Trapani's sentencing hearing, and the crew was with Trapani when he missed the birth of his first child to spend time in court, where he found out he would not be serving prison time.
Storkel means telling some kind of satirical story about him The way things are going now, complete with use of Leonard Cohen's “Everybody Knows.” He's so focused on this that he doesn't seem to notice that he's fallen for Trapani's charisma as well.
Trapani tells you he's a liar right away, at the beginning of the documentary. He tells you that he is not trustworthy. But part of what makes him so charismatic is that he can draw you in, and make you feel it You are lonely They get the real story. He lies to others, but not to them You. It's a lot of fun, isn't it, to believe that you alone are getting the truth from a liar? I think that's how he got Storkel.
Both Storkel and Trapani are gifted storytellers. Bitconid Moves quickly thanks to dramatic reenactments; You'll have to stick around for the credits to even know the dog in some of the shots with Centra Tech investor Rensel is an actor (played by Honor Bowlin). I don't particularly mind the reenactments, but they put a thumb on the scale by giving something to someone He says It happened as a fact. This could be a mistake for a number of mundane reasons (misremembering, for example), but with Trapani in the play, perhaps the director is recreating a lie – and giving it visual weight.
Trapani's version of events is one that clearly benefits Trapani. In this novel, he's a conman who got away with it, he's a wise man, really smart, who knows how to deal with the system, and he's an American anti-hero. (Remember the pictures of Trapani driving a fast car and wearing a suit?)
“Anytime someone says to you, ‘I don’t feel really comfortable answering this question,’ or ‘These are very difficult questions for me to answer,’ you know there’s something going on here.”
It serves Storkel's purposes by not challenging his star too much. But Farkas and others who were burned by Trapani tell a different story: Trapani was beaten up over drugs. He didn't really do much of anything – just spent money and acted like a small-time mafia member, then promptly ratted out his fellow citizens to save himself. Trapani is not smart about this statement. He's just a sleazy guy who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Meanwhile, Sharma cannot easily defend himself on camera – he is in prison. He is accused of committing a slew of crimes, including using a Miami Exotics credit card to vacation in the Bahamas, forging signatures on checks, and using Centra Tech funds to pay off Miami Exotics loans. It's only after the credits that we learn he's denying all of this, giving Trapani's version of the story extra weight once again.
I think Storkel isn't really interested in doing anything more than entertaining, which is perfectly in line with what Trapani is trying to do. Sometimes, that means strange tales are simply left hanging. For example, near the end of the Centra Tech project, Sharma supposedly talked to a Korean company called Bitsset to help trick the world into thinking the fake card worked. I found this strange – what kind of legitimate company would agree to participate in a scam? But the documentary quickly gets over it.
The Bitsset thing bothered me. So I started digging myself, only to find…nothing. There were no Google results for Bitsset in English, except for the criminal case against Sharma. My colleague Sarah Jeong did a quick scroll on the Korean-language web and found plenty of MLB results (the Korean letters for Bitsset and Bo Bichette of the Toronto Blue Jays turned out to be the same), as well as pithead collections and articles about actress Jacqueline Bisset. Bitsset itself was largely absent, except for some online comments. so what He was He. She? A more thorough investigation could have revealed how a real company was tricked into helping with the scam, or it could have uncovered another group of scammers. Either of these could have been helpful in shedding light on the broader cryptocurrency environment.
Any time a cryptocurrency promoter claims that something is “FUD,” you should definitely look into it
It wasn't quite snowing on Storkel. He had Popper tell the audience how journalists know someone is full of bullshit: “Anytime someone says to you, 'I don't really feel comfortable answering that question,' or 'These are questions that are very difficult for me to answer,' I know there's something… It happens here.” So in the end, when Trapani doesn't say what happened to his money from Centra Tech or where he got the money to buy a house, you, the viewer, know something's up. But Storkel doesn't feel like he has to find out what.
I think this is good. Documentaries often straddle the line between actual journalism and entertainment. Storkel loses nothing in entertainment by going along with Trapani's story. And bitcoined, Despite its gross title, it's definitely entertaining!
This story of trust – trusting the wrong people, just because they are charismatic, and not doing the required due diligence – is not limited to small investors like Jacob Rensel. I've now been through two major fraud trials, where big venture capitalists managing other people's money did essentially the same thing. Although Storkel doesn't delve into the matter as much as he could, the film highlights some of the dynamics of how massive scams operate. For example, any time a cryptocurrency promoter claims something is “FUD,” you should do so definitely Consider that.
But as Sterkel explains, just knowing you're dealing with an untrustworthy person isn't necessarily enough to prevent you from being scammed. Centra Tech's successor was FTX. If there is another rise, the next scam will be bigger. Everyone knows.
