Nicole Lappin
speaker
4,192 appearances
114 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 9 Dec
Nicole Lappin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 2.
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This is Crime House.
As they say, money makes the world go round. What many don't talk about is the time it made people's worlds come to a screeching halt. Whether it's greed, desperation, or a thirst for power, money can make even the most unassuming people do unthinkable things. And sometimes those acts can be deadly. This is Scams, Money, and Murder, a Crime House original. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin.
Every Thursday, we alternate between covering infamous money-motivated crimes and gripping interviews with the experts or those who were directly involved themselves. Crime House exists because of you. Please rate, review, and follow Scams, Money, and Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And for early ad-free access and bonus content, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts.
By now, most people have heard of FTX, the crypto exchange that went from being everywhere to suddenly gone. Marketed as a safe and easy way into cryptocurrency, FTX raised hundreds of millions of dollars, ran ads with huge celebrities, and promised financial freedom to everyday investors.
But in late 2022, the empire crumbled when it was revealed that FTX had secretly funneled billions of dollars in customer funds to its sister company, Alameda Research, money that was then used for risky bets, political donations, and lavish personal spending. We covered the story of FTX and its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, also known as SBF, and his dramatic fall in a November 2024 episode.
If you haven't listened to that yet, you can find the link to it in the show notes for this episode. But today we're diving into the personal side of the collapse. My guest today is Jake Thacker, one of the many victims of the FTX collapse. He lost more than $200,000 when the platform crashed. money he believed was safely stored on a legitimate exchange.
Now, Jake wasn't someone who made a bad investment. He was misled by a company that promised transparency while secretly gambling with user funds behind closed doors. He's been incredibly open and honest about his story, and we're so grateful to have him here to share it with us firsthand. Well, Jake, thank you so much for joining us. There is so, so much to talk about.
If somebody has no idea about crypto or FTX or Sam Beckman-Fried or any of that, how would you summarize this whole thing in a sentence or two?
And I want to double click on all of those points, but let's start at the beginning. What was your entry point into crypto? Was it something that you got into casually? Were you a serious investor? What was the deal?
So during COVID, did you sell off your more traditional investments or did you ride it out? Did you use cash that was sitting on the sidelines for dabbling in crypto? What does your overall portfolio look like?
Stocks, bonds?
And when you say that you were using bots to capitalize on a sideways market, that's real nerd stuff. You weren't a newbie investor. You weren't just dabbling in the market for the first time. You were in tech. You had already invested in more traditional vanilla investments before you got into this.
When you first dabble in crypto, I mean, the sort of entryway, ideally, is Bitcoin. FTX was more fringe at the time, although they did put a ton of marketing into it, and we can talk about that. But how did they first come across your radar? What initially drew you into FTX?
Originally, crypto was supposed to be a hedge for traditional assets. Now we've seen with a little bit of time that crypto investments, especially the bigger ones, move in lockstep with the overall market, not as a hedge to it. But at the time, you thought it could be.
That's how it had been sold to everybody as, you know, a new type of currency that can hedge against traditional equity fluctuations and things like that. But FTX, if anyone's confused, was it a coin or not? It was a platform analogous to like a Coinbase where you could buy and sell. Yeah. Right. There was a specific coin, but we'll get into that in a second.
Yeah, or like Fidelity or Vanguard for traditional.
And typically when you're looking at getting into any product, face cream, you know, a lip balm, I don't know. And they are advertising on the Super Bowl and they have all these celebrity sponsors. You think it's really cool. But when it comes to finance, I personally like my finance so, so boring. And in hindsight, it's easy to say that
the type of marketing they did would raise eyebrows because we know what happens next. But did that for you at the time or did that help you trust them more or think that they were, you know, flesh with cash and nothing could go wrong?
Yeah, for sure. It makes so much sense. You, you know, look at Tom Brady and Steph Curry and they have huge brands and probably teams to do due diligence and vet the things that they endorse or promote. It makes all the sense in the world. I mean, how could you have known otherwise? You do say, though, you have a theory as to why things then blew up so quickly.
Can you walk us through what you think really happened?
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