Hosted by Nicole Lapin the podcast Scams, Money, and Murder dives into the dark side of finance. From cutthroat con artists to billion-dollar scams, and even murder, Nicole will take you through the world’s wildest financial crimes -- or talk to the experts who studied them, and the victims that survived them. Scams, Money, and Murder with Nicole Lapin is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. Follow now wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Thursday. For more content, follow us on Instagram and TikTok @crimehouse.
Chapter 1: Who is Nicole Lapin and what is the Scams, Money, and Murder podcast about?
On Scams, Money, and Murder, each week, I take you behind the headlines, diving even deeper to the wildest money crimes in the news, from cunning Ponzi schemes to high-stake political scandals, even a group of killer investment bankers.
Basically, each week we alternate between telling stories about gripping high-stakes crimes featuring the most cutthroat people in the financial world and riveting first-person interviews with the experts and the subjects themselves, the people who really shine a light on these crimes in a way you have never heard before.
So join me every Thursday as I get you up to speed on the sleaziest, the scummiest, and the most corrupt financial criminals the world has to offer. Believe me, your bank account will thank you for it. Just search Scams, Money, and Murder wherever you get your favorite podcasts. In the meantime, I am so excited to share an episode of Scams, Money, and Murder with you today, starting now.
This is Crime House.
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: What happened with the FTX crypto exchange collapse?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: Who is Jake Thacker and how was he affected by the FTX collapse?
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?
It was more traditional.
Stocks, bonds?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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Chapter 4: How did Jake get involved with cryptocurrency and FTX?
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, 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.
Yeah, or like Fidelity or Vanguard for traditional.
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 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
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.
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?
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.
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Chapter 5: What made FTX seem trustworthy to investors despite the risks?
Can you walk us through what you think really happened?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, he had a thing called effective altruism, right? That sounds delightful.
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
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Chapter 6: What were the early warning signs before FTX suddenly collapsed?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
I see. So outside of what you had in FTX, the market was going down. There were some leverage issues, it sounds like. So you were just in the red in general. And so the max you had in FTX was 250. You were able to get like 45K or so out at the time. What was that like? Was there some delay or hurdle there?
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.
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.
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Chapter 7: How did the FTX collapse impact users and the crypto community?
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.
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.
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.
So you thought that it would, you know, freeze for a few days and come back. Exactly.
And it did freeze, but forever.
It never came back. And so it sounds like the group of friends you had were all bullish on FTX at the time. When you first saw the spinny wheel of death, I'm assuming you started texting friends. And what did they say? They had the same issue? How did this spread?
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.
But they were all very smart and had been in traditional markets for many, many, many years. And
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
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Chapter 8: What are the unanswered questions and ongoing challenges after the FTX collapse?
But he tweeted, you know, as part of Binance's exit from FTX equity last year, Binance received roughly 2.1 billion USD equivalent in cash, BUSD and FTT, which is FTX token. Due to recent revelations that have come to light, we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books, end quote. Did you see this?
I saw that.
Come out real time?
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're not saying anything. Good luck. That was a big... message in the marketplace.
Yeah. I mean, for you, did you think this could spread to more of the financial system? I mean, it sounds like you lived through 2008. Did you have a moment where you thought the whole system could implode?
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