Daniel: Here’s a wild statistic for you. During the great crypto gold rush a few years back, law enforcement investigated thousands of new crypto projects. Their conclusion? Over 98% of them were either outright scams or total failures that lost all their investors' money. Sophia: Whoa. Ninety-eight percent. That’s not just a risky bet; that’s like walking into a casino where almost every single machine is rigged to take your money and then explode. Daniel: Exactly. And the stories behind that number are even crazier than you can imagine—faked deaths, missing billions, and a level of absurdity that feels like a comedy, except people lost their life savings. Sophia: It sounds like a complete minefield. Where are these stories coming from? Daniel: They're from the incredible, award-winning book Crypto Wars: Faked Deaths, Missing Billions and Industry Disruption by Erica Stanford. Sophia: Oh, I've heard of her! And Stanford isn't just some journalist looking in from the outside. She's a total crypto insider—she founded the UK's biggest crypto networking club, she's a guest lecturer on the topic. She has a front-row seat to the chaos. Daniel: That’s what makes the book so compelling. She wrote it as a field guide, a warning to help people spot the red flags. She says the whole period was a digital Wild West, and that’s the perfect place for us to start.

Sophia: The Wild West. That’s a powerful image. It brings to mind this chaotic, lawless frontier where anything goes. Is that what the early crypto space was like? Daniel: That's the perfect way to put it. The book describes the period around 2017 and 2018 as the Initial Coin Offering, or ICO, boom. Essentially, the technology made it so easy that almost anyone could create their own digital coin and sell it to the public for millions, with virtually no oversight. Sophia: Anyone? Like, I could have created 'SophiaCoin' from my laptop? Daniel: You absolutely could have, and you probably would've raised a few million dollars. The hype was that intense. Stanford shares this perfect example: a company called the Long Island Iced Tea Corp. A beverage company. Sophia: Okay, I’m with you. They make iced tea. Daniel: Well, in late 2017, they announced they were changing their name to "Long Blockchain Corp." They didn't actually have a blockchain product or any real plan. They just added the buzzword to their name. Sophia: Let me guess. Their stock price went through the roof. Daniel: It jumped 289% overnight. The FBI is now investigating them for insider trading. It just shows that the substance didn't matter; the hype was everything. Sophia: That's incredible. It’s like the entire market was driven by pure FOMO—the fear of missing out. People were so terrified of missing the next Bitcoin that they’d throw money at anything that sounded vaguely techy. Daniel: And it gets even more absurd. Stanford tells the story of a developer who created the "Useless Ethereum Token." He was brutally honest about it. The website literally said, "You’re going to give some random person on the internet money, and they’re going to take it and go buy stuff with it. Probably electronics... Seriously, don’t buy these tokens." Sophia: Come on. No one invested in that. Please tell me no one invested in that. Daniel: People gave him forty thousand dollars. Sophia: Oh, for crying out loud. That’s just… what does that say about us? It feels less like investing and more like a collective, global-scale gambling addiction. Daniel: It’s the psychology of a gold rush. But it also opened the door for much more malicious behavior. It wasn't all just useless-but-honest tokens. There was outright fraud. Stanford talks about an ICO called Benebit. They had a slick website, a big marketing budget, and a professional-looking team page. Sophia: Okay, but I have a feeling there’s a catch. Daniel: The catch was that the team photos were all stolen from a British boys' school website. They literally just took pictures of students and gave them fake names and job titles. Sophia: You're kidding me. They put a bunch of teenagers' school photos on their website and called them their executive team? Daniel: And they raised about four million dollars before people figured it out and they vanished with the money. Sophia: Wow. That’s where the book’s inverted 'duck test' comes in, right? The idea that in normal life, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Daniel: Exactly. But as crypto influencer Charlie Lee famously tweeted, in the world of crypto, if it looks and quacks like a duck... it’s a Ponzi scheme. The more perfect it looks, the more suspicious you should be.

Daniel: And that idea of a Ponzi scheme is the perfect bridge to the next level of deception Stanford covers. We're moving beyond the low-effort, absurd ICOs into something far more sophisticated and devastating: massive, global operations built around a single, charismatic leader. Sophia: You’re talking about the ones that felt more like cults than companies. The ones that sucked in millions of people, not just thousands. Daniel: Precisely. And the ultimate example in the book is OneCoin and its founder, the so-called 'Missing Cryptoqueen,' Dr. Ruja Ignatova. This wasn't just a quick cash grab; this was an empire. In 2016, she stood on stage at London's Wembley Arena in a ballgown, surrounded by pyrotechnics, and told a roaring crowd that in two years, "nobody will speak about Bitcoin anymore!" Sophia: That takes some serious confidence. What was her secret sauce? How did she build such a massive, devoted following when there were clearly red flags everywhere? Daniel: Stanford really dissects the playbook, and it's fascinating. First, you have the leader: Dr. Ruja was brilliant, Oxford-educated, charismatic. She had the credentials to appear legitimate. Second, you have a powerful, simple story: this was a 'financial revolution for the unbanked,' a way for the little guy to get rich. It was emotionally resonant. Sophia: Okay, so a great leader and a great story. But that can't be all of it. Daniel: The third ingredient was the secret weapon: Multi-Level Marketing, or MLM. OneCoin wasn't just something you invested in; it was something you sold. You got huge commissions for recruiting new investors, who then recruited others. Sophia: Ah, there it is. It's the 'bitch of Wall Street meets MLM,' a phrase Dr. Ruja herself apparently used in an email. It’s so insidious because it weaponizes personal relationships. It’s not a stranger telling you to invest; it’s your cousin, your neighbor, your friend from church. You trust them. Daniel: And they built an information bubble around their followers. They were explicitly told not to trust Google, that any negative articles were just 'haters' trying to suppress the revolution. They created their own reality. Sophia: But at its core, was there any actual technology? Did OneCoin even exist? Daniel: That's the most shocking part. The book tells the story of a blockchain expert named Bjorn Bjorke. In 2016, he was approached with a job offer to be the Chief Technology Officer for OneCoin and build their blockchain. Sophia: Wait, they were hiring a CTO to build the blockchain in 2016? But they had been operating for years, claiming to be a cryptocurrency. Daniel: Exactly Bjorke’s thought. He dug in and discovered the truth. There was no blockchain. There never had been. The entire multi-billion-dollar operation was running on a simple SQL database. Just a centralized spreadsheet. Dr. Ruja could literally just type in a new value for OneCoin whenever she wanted. Sophia: That is bone-chilling. So the entire thing was a mirage. No technology, no coin, just a story and a pyramid of believers. The human cost when that mirage disappeared must have been astronomical. Daniel: Billions of dollars vanished. Lives were completely destroyed. And Dr. Ruja? She got a tip that the FBI was closing in, boarded a flight in 2017, and has never been seen again. She remains one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted fugitives.

Sophia: It’s just staggering. The scale of the deception in these stories is hard to comprehend. From fake teams to a completely fake blockchain. Daniel: It is. And that's the central tension that Erica Stanford explores so well in Crypto Wars. On one hand, you have this technology—blockchain—with genuine, revolutionary potential. The book touches on how it can empower people in economically unstable countries like Venezuela, giving them a way to escape hyperinflation. Sophia: Right, so this isn't an anti-crypto book at all. It's an anti-scam book. It’s a fierce critique of how human behavior can corrupt a promising technology. Daniel: Exactly. The core message is that with great technological power comes an equally great potential for grift. The technology didn't invent greed or gullibility; it just put them on steroids and scaled them globally. These are old-fashioned frauds wrapped in shiny, modern technology. Sophia: What really strikes me is that the red flags were timeless. Promises of guaranteed high returns, pressure to recruit your friends, being told not to trust outside information—that’s the classic playbook for any scam, digital or not. Daniel: Perfectly put. Crypto Wars is essentially a field guide to spotting those timeless red flags in a new, digital wrapper. As Stanford says, if the book can save even one person from losing their savings to a scam, it has achieved its purpose. Sophia: It’s a powerful and necessary warning. Before you jump on the next big thing that promises to change the world, maybe do a quick reverse-image search on the executive team's headshots. Just in case. Daniel: A very practical piece of advice. We'd love to hear what you think. Have you ever encountered a pitch—crypto or otherwise—that set off your alarm bells? Find us on our social channels and share your story. We read everything. Sophia: Your insights help shape our conversations. Daniel: This is Aibrary, signing off.