Jake Thacker
Appearances
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Well, again, this is... If you know anything about... and this is getting into more of the political side of what we're experiencing on a current day, present day. There's a group called the PayPal Mafia.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
They've been toying around with this thing called the network state forever and wanting to break down kind of the barriers of traditional government and society and whatever it is that their philosophy is, that kind of thing. I saw SBF as, and this is more retrospect than it was at the current time, of somebody that really wanted to participate in that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Because the one aspect to their scheme, whatever it is, was they didn't have a way to siphon off money. You can have internet. You can be anywhere in the world with the internet. You can have enough money to build platforms out in the middle of the ocean if you want. But you still had to use traditional banks. Crypto changed all of that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And on March 6th, 2025, Trump signed an executive order establishing the first crypto treasury or reserve, whatever the title is. He also invested heavily in this company called Praxis.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
um which is part of the whole paypal mafia thing and so all these indicators were that he wanted to be part of that group was willing to give over billions of dollars in order to do that and it fit kind of the motif of why he originally said he started ftx in his principles of kind of a decentralized collective, right? And everyone gives to everyone and so on and so forth.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And that's what my thought is, because again, no one has ever questioned why did he start this? It wasn't nefarious at the beginning.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And again, in all intents and purposes, despite all the marketing and that kind of thing, it was doing that. Like the platform did better things than some of the other ones. It was holding up to, quote unquote, its true mission or philosophy in some respect. But again, I think the Alameda platform
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And the FTX, whatever they're doing with Alameda, whatever that was for, again, I think ties back into some of his inkling to be part of that crew. And whatever it is that they want to try and accomplish, I think drove a lot of that and it ended up blinding him to his responsibility of, I started this company. There was millions of people involved. There's billions of dollars involved.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I can't just neglect that at this point. But by that point, it was too far gone. The funds were not there.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I pushed aside the juvenile nature of the platform. Although people didn't seem to have an issue with it, and it seemed to be drawing a larger following in community day after day, month after month, it still wasn't as robust as some of the larger players. But money, it does weird things to people, and it makes you rationalize things that you wouldn't normally rationalize.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
in situations where you didn't think you were going to lose it. And that's prospect theory, if you're familiar with that, if we value loss more than we value gain. And that's what drove a lot of, I think, people to start to look at FTX more legitimately in, again, 2024, when the market was, I mean, Bitcoin was tanking. I think by June or July, it was the lowest it had been. And
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
almost the inception of Bitcoin. But that was probably the one that I look back on and say the lack of longevity and established order within the marketplace was something I probably should have been more concerned about.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
So it was relatively quick. It was up to about 250K at one point. I was able to get a little bit out over before the whole implosion happened, 206, 207K total. But at certain points, it had fluctuated up a little bit above that because of transferring from Binance and Coinbase, which I also had wallets with. Due to the timing of kind of coins, right? So this coin is up, this coin is down.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I'm going to transfer some now. I won't lose as much in the transfer. I won't get these big transfer fees, so on and so forth. So by the time November hit, I had pretty much stopped all movement because I had enough money
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
what i was using ftx for was really more of a wallet a bank to store money for coins that i was going to then cash out on to pay back some of the debts that i had incurred while upping my investment in crypto right so leveraging certain assets that i had knowing that i have to pay them back and i didn't want to wait on that and i did very well
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And I was able to save face in light of the downturn in the marketplace. So yeah, it was about 250 was I think probably the max that I ever had on there, but I wasn't trading on the platform. I didn't ever buy any of their tokens that they offered. I didn't use the exchange to invest in any other of the coins or tokens.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
It was simply just a storage place, knowing that if I'm going to take out a little bit here or there over the course of the next few months because my goal was to take it all out in December, pay off substantial debt that I had, and then continue doing what I had been doing in the past and maybe look into using it as some sort of subsidiary platform, not my primary. I really like finance.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I really was leveraging them pretty effectively. And I don't know if that answers your question, but it was a good chunk of change. But I had, in total, That year alone probably lost about 800, upwards of like 800K due to the market turn down and some other factors when Bitcoin also had some issues in June as well.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Oh, no, no, no. This was right before November. So I had transferred some out because the market started to kind of track back up a little bit. So I was going to try and use some of that that I pulled out from FTX to make up a little bit of losses that had occurred over the summertime. And so that came out around beginning of October, end of November.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
end of September, so I'd have to go double check that, but it was before November. Because when November hit and everyone scrambled to try and figure out what was going on, I, myself, many others hit transfer, transfer funds out. Okay, great. And then it just was like that spinning wheel of death that just sat there and nothing happened.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And in even some instances, when I would log in, it would say, Transfer complete.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
No. It's not transfer complete. It's just transfer. Their side said, the system said, we sent the proper messages to have the transfer be completed, but there was no money. There was no mechanism to actually send anything. And then it was just gone. It was just a black hole. You couldn't even go to the website and it just had their spinning logo.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Yeah, this was November 8th, November 9th, because it was abrupt. I mean, there were some leading indicators, right, and that kind of thing. But in all honesty, myself and others, again, in retrospect, probably should have been paying more attention. But... There was nothing in our mind where an entire platform in 24 hours, in 48 hours, could just vanish and be gone.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
No money, no assurance, no backups, no nothing. That had not happened yet. Similar to FTX, in June, Coinbase had to freeze trades for a few days because of some liquidity issues. They needed to transfer... out some of what they had invested in, get some liquidity, put it back into user accounts and so on and so forth. And so they had X trades for a few days.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Myself and I think others were thinking that's probably what's happening here is that they have over leveraged themselves. They need to dial it back. They need to sell off some of whatever they were messing around with in order to have the liquidity pool be exactly right for the amount of volume that was being traded on the platform.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I primarily used a tool called Bitsgap and there's a community there that I had been involved with and they were kind of like ex-day traders and more kind of hobbyists than anything else. No one was like serious, serious, this is our job, this is what we do on a day-to-day basis for our well-being and our paychecks.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
But they were all very smart and had been in traditional markets for many, many, many years. And
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
i probably was more the anomaly there's probably four or five others out of a group of a few thousand that actually had jumped into ftx and just decided to toy around with it so i immediately obviously got on the forum the message board with them and said hey are you guys having issues yes we're having issues and then that spiraled to texting other people just that i knew that traded crypto are you using ftx are you able to get access
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
But in reality, I didn't have a strong network of people that were FTX experts or were predominantly using it as their primary exchange. And so I myself was left with a lot of question marks and trying to keep up with all the news that was going back and forth. It was this one day, it was that one day. Then there was the bankruptcy. The website went up, the Kroll bankruptcy website went up and
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Figuratively checking that out and filing a claim and it was total chaos. And then the interviews started to roll in and, you know, the story kind of evolved because what I knew, I knew in that first NPR interview was it had been two weeks and so much happened in the timeframe of the initial platform release.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And then the next day, bankruptcy filing to then a month later or even into January of 2024, where people really started to get the landscape of how serious this was and that there was no money, that it wasn't hidden. It wasn't mismanaged to the point where they had siphoned it off into all these other things and we just had to go to these other things. It was up in smoke. It just evaporated. And
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
That was not something anyone else thought of either that, okay, platform can collapse. Okay, great. That can happen. But then $10 billion worth of assets can just disappear as well. Where did it go? Who did it go to? How did it happen? Why are these people going to cough it up? And how do we find it? It was very challenging for me because again, the community that I
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
normally messaged in, they didn't have a ton of insight. And so I tried my best to try and go find resources. There are some people also that have been interviewed over the course of all of this that I had reached out to and gotten their two cents on and that kind of thing. But there were a lot of people that were left on their own without questions, without any resources.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And maybe the few people that they did know that had used the platform didn't have any other information either. They had the same questions with the same lack of answers. And so you could have had 10,000 people texting in one group and it would have all been the same. It would have been a lot of frustration more than it would have been proactive.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I didn't see it come out in real time. I saw a post about it. I think it was on Reddit, actually. Somebody had posted it there because I don't have Twitter. And so I wasn't trolling the Twitter feeds or anything like that. But I did see that. That was my biggest red flag that things were wrong. Because again, Binance was someone that knew what they were doing.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
how to do it regardless of any nefarious activities that they were involved in or not they had been around they had played the game they knew how to manage upturns downturns in the market so on and so forth and so i respected that it was a huge sign that if they are not confident in an investment of that size and magnitude there's something very wrong.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Because again, they had been talking for some time and SBF had hinted at partnership or some sort of investment from Binance, which would have raised their profile significantly. There was the tweet also that SBF put out about Everything's fine. Liquidity's fine. I didn't see that until maybe a few days after it came out because I didn't have Twitter. Then it came when the implosion happened.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
People obviously came back to that saying like, well, why did he say this? And so on and so forth. So I didn't see that in real time. Even if I had the question of why did Binance all of a sudden just shake it and say, hey, without rhyme or reason, we are simply just liquidating everything. Not like, hey, we're going to pause. We're maybe going to do this in phases. It was, we're out.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
We're not saying anything. Good luck. That was a big... message in the marketplace.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Of course. Yeah. My first thought was, how does this affect the market? How does this affect the legitimacy of all the other platforms? And are they doing the exact same thing? And do they equally have cash on hand to make good on all of their users or creditors? I immediately thought that. And I immediately stopped trading.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
pulled out any of the remaining assets that I had or as much as I could at the time. Because again, there were some restrictions because the run on the bank was definitely a real concern, I think, amongst the other platforms. And it took a few months, but finally I had divested everything I had in crypto, which at that point was not a lot and had got it back into a traditional bank account.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
After that, I haven't jumped back in. And clearly things are operating differently fine for the most part the market has had that recovery has been had a fabulous year this year for the most part and maybe I missed out but at the time I was not in a position to even consider that it was ships on fire everyone for themselves kind of a thing
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
It was probably a couple of weeks. I can't remember the exact date. It was the first week in December. I had given the first NPR interview and
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
made me think you know i really should go check i should i should go back through and i should be seeing if i can get out on the platform seeing what's really there versus not there because they were transfers on the end of bitcoin and finance that said pending that there had been something that had triggered a notification that said there's a transfer pending
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And I figured because of that, eventually the system would get sorted out. Because at this point, there's still a huge doubt in everyone's mind that the money is completely gone. that it's just trained and that it's a system issue and that they need to reconcile this versus this. And there's just a lot of movie pieces and it's taking time. The bankruptcy had been filed.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
So obviously the legal entities need to get involved and verify things. So it was definitely that first week in December when I sent a message to, I think it was Coinbase support and said, Are these going to go through? And they said no. As far as we know, these are just system triggers when an event happens.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
There hasn't been any other data sent through or any other meta tags suggest that these are legit. And if you want, we can cancel them out. But the likelihood of them coming through is nil at this point. so on and so forth. So I was like, okay, it's really just gone. And that realization was very stark because at that point it wasn't, I've lost some money. I'm going to have some, it was zero.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I don't know how many people have had that happen before, but I had never had that happen in any other investments that I had, whether it was a bet, whether it was something from my youth or anything like that, never from a fairly decent amount to zero in less than three weeks and with almost no recourse of recovery. It was mind-boggling, but it was also terrifying at the same time.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Yeah. I immediately got in touch with a debt restructuring company because I had essentially told my debtors or creditors that I was planning to pay back what I had leveraged at the end of the fiscal year. That was kind of an expectation. And They had brokered a deal with me, understanding that it was a short-term loan, essentially, that was going to be paid back in quick succession.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And so they were fine with allowing me to go on this list.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Yeah, I used that money to invest more heavily in crypto in general, not necessarily... So I immediately knew I was going to have to work with them and I was going to need professional help that I wouldn't be able to do that on my own. So I met with the debt collection company
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
We worked out a plan and, you know, their job is to work with people that you have debt with, your creditors and so on and so forth to come up with reasonable repayment structuring plans and so on and so forth. And I had my job. I worked at a company called Loom at the time and was doing fairly well from a career standpoint.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And it was going to be extremely tight, but it was going to be manageable. I would be able to do it if nothing else happened. Well, it wasn't until February when the tech layoffs happened and I got laid off from my job that things really got serious. And at that point, debt collection wasn't an option. And I thought, okay, where are the real options here?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Bankruptcy was one of the first things that somebody recommended. It's not something that I had ever considered myself doing. having to do, needing to do, or having to consider it all in the course of my life. I had liked to think that I was pretty financially prudent and, and that, um, something like that was not in my future, but it was.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And I had opted to do chapter seven, personal bankruptcy, but that is a qualification process that takes quite some time because they look back at your history and they say, okay, if you were here at this point and you're now here, why can't you do this? Or why couldn't you do this? Or what happened? And so my bankruptcy lawyer essentially said, you can't file right away.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
There was nothing in our mind where an entire platform in 24 hours, in 48 hours, could just vanish. It's the cycle that is very difficult to get out of. It can happen to normal people in the blink of an eye.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
We can get everything ready, but we have to wait at least eight to 12 months because you won't qualify. There's a very specific bar that has to be met. And unfortunately, if they wouldn't look back right now, you have had some tough times, but you still wouldn't qualify. And so that started
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
This is essentially a two-year journey of not getting any income, not having full-time work, and having to scrape by in order to meet the qualifications to file. And then some events that happened after filing that drug things out in February, March, got out of it. And when I say got out of it, got out of the bankruptcy, got out of the foreclosure,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
any of the financial obligations and responsibilities I had prior to FTX. It's been that long. I told the crew on Thursday that my mother was nice enough to buy me some groceries at a fancy store that we have here called New Seasons. I don't ever shop there anymore because a piece of food costs $50. It's a very privileged thing to be able to go there.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And I just remember thinking, eating almond and realizing this is the first time my refrigerator has been full of locally sourced whole foods like vegetables and fruits and that kind of thing in almost two and a half years. That was a sad and also humbling realization to just kind of put together in that time. But it sums it up quite aptly in the sense of the catalyst of FTX.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
the job markets being laid off, going through all of the proceedings to situate myself in a place where I can't even begin to start to rebuild. And that's essentially where I am right now. And it's taken not as long.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I don't think I was. In fact, I got the comment a lot that, how are you handling this so well? And I don't have a straight answer for that. I didn't really think about it that much or try and pin it down. I just kind of said, let's just keep going. Let's keep going. I just slided into the tunnel, like, don't give up. And that's really what kind of drove me.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
In fact, this place that I'm in right now is not my condo that I had owned. I recently moved in the last two months. I'm essentially living here for free. And the person that owns this is actually in Europe for the next few months and was nice enough to let me squat here while he's off doing fun things, I guess. But it was extremely challenging, but the challenge also brought a lot of
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
opportunity for me to discover and question. I'm kind of an analytical person and I can now understand and appreciate the kind of institutional
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
process in which once people find themselves in a position of bankruptcy or insolvency that the mechanisms and agencies in place to help lift people up or to support also are as detrimental as anything else and it's this cycle that is very difficult to get out of if you don't have the resolve or even the sliver of resources to be able to do it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And I felt compelled to try and understand that and fight that in some instance, many times failure. And so it wasn't just, you know, the FTX and losing my job. It was fighting some of the bankruptcy trustees. It was fighting some of the court proceedings when it came to the foreclosure and how that all played out. And
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
spending money that i didn't have other people's money to go to court and try and fight some of these things and just get laughed out of the courtroom essentially so it was a humbling experience say at least not that i didn't invite some of it myself but i don't wish it upon anyone and regardless of
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
the trigger with FTX or not, there is a systemic issue in the country that allows you to be able to file for bankruptcy, but then does not allow you to necessarily come out of that or essentially benefit from the opportunity to do that in a way that moves things forward, in my opinion. In all honesty, you know, the reason why I said
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I didn't think bankruptcy was for me is because I thought these people were lazy. I thought they were irresponsible. I thought there was a whole stereotype of things that I had thought people with bankruptcy in that realm of losing things or having to be in that situation, the kind of character they were.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
just to find myself in there and to be extremely humbled and humanized to realize that it's going to happen to anyone. I shouldn't say it probably can't happen to the PayPal mafia crew, but it could happen to normal people. in the blink of an eye. And I wish that there were a better solution. And it's frustrating. That is probably the thing that drove me the most is why is it like this?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Why are there no resources? Why can't I get questions answered? I'm being told what to do, but I'm not being told why. I don't have an advocate outside of paying someone to help me get through the process to try and solution something different or understand like, hey, is my situation worthy of this versus that? That's probably what drove me at the end of the day.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I didn't partake in any of the class action lawsuits simply because I had enough going on in my personal life that it wasn't something that I had the headspace for. In fact, I needed to be away from that and not be involved. I did file a claim. However, That was very early days before things changed, before the new name came along.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I'm still a little unclear about some of the FTX subsidiaries and now new holdings and that kind of thing. And they're obviously still experiencing major issues because payments have not been going out as they promised. At least I haven't seen them anyway. I did file a claim. I did not want to not... tried to recoup some of the funds that I had lost.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
For their bankruptcy, right? So you could get your authentication and verification done, which has been an issue. I have not done that yet again, extended the deadline to June 1. So I'm probably going to do that here the next month or two, just to play the game. But I initially did mine. And then I I kind of washed my hands of it and I didn't want to partake in it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I watched a little bit of the trial and obviously heard the verdict and was like, that's great. Fantastic. Like justice is served, I guess, but it didn't have an effect on me. It didn't have effect on what I was dealing with and what I was going to have to deal with and the challenges that I was facing, you know, in the months that I knew were coming up. And so, yeah,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
In all honesty, I don't know if people are going to see all their money again. They say they are. But if you go and look on the website, the amount of claims that they have, the amount of motions that have been filed just within the past couple of months is insanity. It's going to take years. I mean, they have the money. Great. That's one thing. Getting it to the entities that...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
are needing it, sorted out all of those claims, because there's hundreds of thousands of them, I think it's just going to take forever.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
My thoughts now are almost worse than they were before in the sense of everyone painted him as this mastermind villain. I don't see that now. I see it as a spoiled kid who had parents that were able to guide him he went to you know prestigious institutions that enabled him access to the likes of peter thiel and other investors that would fund him for all
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Intents and purposes, he had no interest in crypto before starting FTX. If you go back and look at his tenure at MIT, like he didn't ever prophesize like, I'm going to build the next crypto exchange. Now he prophesized some of his other philosophical ambitions and that kind of thing, but it wasn't necessarily crypto platform, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
It was some iteration of freeness and community, but it wasn't necessarily that. So I see him as a privileged person. white male, like myself, able to build and get incredible access to initial funds to scale and perpetrate something that he personally wanted to do. Whatever that is, and I kind of alluded to what my theory is, that's the big unknown.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
But he didn't start this for the betterment of mankind or people kind. He was selfish. He had an agenda, what that agenda is. Hard to say. I mean, obviously there was some legitimacy at the beginning. There was an intention to do this. It wasn't a Ponzi scheme. It wasn't a scam. It wasn't, you know, I'm going to pull the rug out from you at the very last moment.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
There was the intent to provide for the most part. But I think that he deserves every minute in jail, sitting in his cell with P. Diddy and the likes. They're good riddance. They deserve each other.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I probably wouldn't say much. I have not a lot of words for someone like that, but I would say that regardless of whatever restitution he has to pay back, whatever time he has to do to make good on his crime and that kind of thing, I hope he's haunted by the fact of The detriment to people, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
The hundreds of thousands, 400 plus thousand users on the platform that were affected by this, not the big investors. I'm talking about people that had their life savings of 50,000 K or less, or, you complete and utter enveloped into the platform, just destroyed, right? Lives completely destroyed. I mean, my situation is not perfect, but
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Some people literally, they either retired or were planning to retire, now they can't retire and has messed up their life, has messed up their family's lives, has messed up their children's lives, like generational impact. I hope that that haunts him because it's the only restitution really that the victims will get if they get any money back anytime soon or if they get the full value.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
It's a little too late, right? The damage has been done.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Well... I think it's justice in the fact that regardless of the amount of time, which clearly was done as a precedence for nefarious characters that may have plans of doing something like this in the future or are currently in the marketplace and doing things that could be considered fraudulent or affecting the market and consumers of crypto and the currencies and the tokens and whatever.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
the innocent that just want to partake in a proactive and positive way. I don't think justice was served in the sense that time in prison with these types of crimes doesn't create a state of what I would call civic restitution for the people that were impacted. Sure, then they could file bankruptcy and they could find the money and maybe get it back to people.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
But as I said, there is a precipice of time that is really essential for that to really matter, for people's lives to be not irrevocably changed. There's been a lot of great coverage about the case and about him and about the situation, but not about the systems and the institutions that manage this and manage the blowback of it and are supposed to be in charge of
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
rectifying and resolving these types of things. I think that's where the justice fails. And that's not necessarily something you can pin on him, but I would rather see him spend less time in prison and have to help with this some shape or form, right? Be on the hook for making this work and happen.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And even if it's going around door to door to the victims and apologizing or something along those lines, then, you know, hiding away in a cell and that kind of thing. And who knows, maybe he will get pardoned by Trump and that'll be just icing on the cake if that happens. But I think the system did what the system was designed to do.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I don't think the system is designed in a way that really is an advocate for the victims in these types of scenarios.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
In some respects, yeah. I don't know of this miraculous collection of scenarios that just collate into one massive kind of fallout. I don't know if that could happen again because there's probably triggers and flags in place on all primary scenarios. Changes now that would prevent that from happening or they're very cautious about that happening. Right.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Their attention is so focused on this now that they're not focused on the next thing that could happen. And of course, it's just a matter of time.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I'm not an investor and I'm not a financial advisor, but I have heard plenty of people say and give me advice of an investment is never secure. It is never realized until it's realized. And all you can do is ensure that you're comfortable investing.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
with what you are investing in and that you have done enough of the research and vetting that you can minimize as much risk as possible that is known because what's unknown is unknown. And at the end of the day, it's a personal choice. And I would never tell somebody not to do it because of my experience, because it was a time and place and
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
It could be years before something like that happens again, if it could, but at the same time, it could be beneficial. They could profit from it. It's really their own personal approach to that risk assessment. And I would say for me, have the caution as much, that threshold is much higher than it would be two, three years ago, but that doesn't preclude it from being like any other investment.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
There aren't the benefits to be realized. There are definitely the pitfalls, but That's the same with property these days. That's the same with the traditional stock market. So nothing is safe. It's just how comfortable you are and how willing you are to potentially go down that journey and see what happens.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Everything else is death and taxes, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I actually was just looking at it the other day. Obviously, I haven't done an interview in a while and was poking around and pulled up the old Bitsgap community and said hey to everyone and that kind of thing. And they were like, Jake, where have you been? I was like, doing some stuff, you know.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
So I myself, you know, can't be too much of an alarmist because at some point or another, I probably will. I certainly will probably consider myself to be, from an investor standpoint, few here, few there. Just again, I enjoyed the challenge of it and the strategy and analysis. That's still something I think is tangible and can happen without fear.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
you know, having the world fall out from under you and that kind of thing. So yeah, at some point I could see myself right this second. No, I have other things to focus on, but you know, if I get back to a place where I have some stability and some walking around money, then yeah, absolutely.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I would say... Try. Definitely try. I'm a bad example in the sense that I should have done more for my own cause, for my own case. But because I was dealing with other things, I was kind of too upset and too disgruntled to really... be an advocate for myself.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
But if you find yourself in a situation like this, there are more people now, I would say, readily available and willing to jump in and assist, whether it be lawyers, whether it be advocacy groups, whether it be communities. whatever the case may be than there have been in the past.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
And so there are more resources available now for victims of such types of crimes, especially I would say the crypto markets. And that if you feel like that has happened or you've definitely have been impacted by it, then don't just write off your losses, like fight for it because there is the potential to get your some portion of your pie back for sure.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Right. That's a fair point. Touche to that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Appreciate what you guys are doing.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
It's not a Ponzi scheme. The way that Sam Beckman-Fried probably would coin it is a venture venture. gone horribly wrong. But in the eyes of everyone that was involved, it seemed like a total swindle, an unknown investment scheme. And no one had any idea that this could even happen, that it was even fathomable. And the story is the precedent of this thing happening.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
But really, at the end of the day, it was an adventure that everyone thought was on the up and up and had the scale of a rocket ship just to realize it was full of air. There was nothing substantial there at all.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Yeah, no. In fact, I, for the longest time, even when Bitcoin was the first one that came out, I kind of looked at it very skeptically as well. It wasn't until the pandemic, really 2021, 2022, when I got into it. And it was really more of proximity to people that were doing it and had kind of egged me on to just try it.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
You never know, kind of the green eggs and ham scenario of you can't knock it until you try it. And once I did, it was the training that we were doing or the community that I was a part of was fun. We were creating algorithmic types of bots, grid bots, and so on and so forth, to trade in the sideways market. And it started out as a hobby. It started out as small amounts, $100 here, $200 there.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
But then over time, as more success came in and I felt more comfortable, it turned into a real thing and turned into real money and turned into something that I thought I could pivot a lot of my current portfolio into and was sorely mistaken at the end of the day.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Yeah, a handful of tech stocks. I worked for a couple of startups and had gotten equity there and was really leveraging that because it was quite sizable. But in all honesty, almost everything that I had in traditional markets ended up going into crypto as far as money that I chose to invest.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Yeah, that's fair to say. And again, the only reason I got into crypto was because the people that, again, I was close to my friends, other people from some of the communities that I kind of wrote in were doing that. And that's what I was interested in. And so that's what triggered my initial stake in the market.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Initially, we all heard about FTX and we all kind of saw their trajectory just go through the roof quite quickly. But in all honesty, I didn't even give them a second thought until it was the beginning of 2024 when the market started to kind of
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
turn and started to go down and a lot of my other assets that i had outside of ftx were down the whole market was down and when that happens you look at strategies to optimize margins and look at ways to reduce your cost and increase your gains or sustain your gains and ftx their pitch was
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
We can do all the things that these bigger platforms can do, but we do it in a better, more efficient way at a lower cost to the consumer. Transaction fees are lower. We have all these other tokens and assets that are poised to be even more lucrative than some of the traditional bitcoins or ethereums and so on and so forth. And so it really was that that triggered my
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
engagement with the platform to begin with.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Yeah, exactly. It was an exchange just like Binance or Coinbase, and it allowed people to commoditize on the market, right? I want to invest X amount on this coin. They take your money, they invest it, they supposedly hold it for you, give you access to your returns, right? It's kind of like a Robinhood.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Exactly. And so, again, that's where the biggest hang up was in the crypto markets was we still weren't free of the traditional or institutional ways in which
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
money transferred and flowed right and that's to your point of it wasn't hedging or it wasn't in lieu of the traditional markets it was in parallel or in tandem because again at that time crypto was not seen as a quote-unquote currency and so it had to follow some sort of recognized monetary value in the dollar more often than not was the one that we used in the us in exchange
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
Or wallet, in some instances, a place to store money or coins or tokens that you had acquired and weren't ready to put on the market or weren't ready to pull out of the exchange and put into the traditional market and so on and so forth.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
You know, honestly, it put them on the radar for me, but it didn't really give me pause for a couple of reasons. Not so much as all the flash and the glitz and so on and so forth. But for instance, I worked for a company called Under Armour Tom Brady and Steph Curry were both athletes of Under Armour.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I had the lovely pleasure of meeting both several times and it sounds very cliche, but I trusted them and therefore I knew that they had invested in this platform and that as they have financiers and managers to guide them with their money and how to invest it wisely and what seems legitimate and what doesn't, I kind of wrote on that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
I said, well, if Steph's in there, if Tom's in there, it can't be that bad. And my initial approach to the platform was not to use it as a trading platform. It was just to hold funds. I needed a place to hold funds and be able to access them quickly without incurring all these large transaction fees.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
and it was supposed to be temporary it wasn't something in my long-term strategy was a short-term solution given the current market fluctuation at the time and i think myself and a lot of others sadly saw the perception and saw the optics as more legitimized because of the actors involved and probably should have been more diligent in our vetting, but at the time everything worked.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder
There wasn't really any red flags either. The platform for itself works exactly as it was pitched and There weren't any issues up until November.