The Million Dollar Fake Company - The Ray Trapani / Centra Tech story
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So this guy is about to make millions of dollars by hyping up a product that doesn't exist. Now, like me, the guy's name is Ray. And Ray is 24, living in Miami. And bro really wants to be rich. And he's always cooking up some kind of new scheme to make that happen. Like he's stealing prescription drugs and selling them for a while. Then he and his friends borrow some money and they start a luxury car rental business. And that business does pretty well, but they're young and kind of dumb and pretty quickly they blow through all their profits and their business fails. And that is when Ray is back to square one and now he needs a new hustle to make money. And one day in 2017, one of Bray's friends, this guy who we'll call Sorbet, Sorbet gets a crazy idea. They wanna create a debit card that lets you access your cryptocurrency. That way you can instantly buy stuff with your Bitcoin when you're like out at the store or something. And a debit card for crypto, honestly, it's not a terrible idea.
And so they're gonna create a whole fake company and attach it to a cryptocurrency, like a coin. However, Ray, Sorbet, and their other friend, this guy, Farkas, they have several problems with this plan. One, they know nothing about crypto, nothing about Bitcoin or anything about that space. And two, the very specific technology for a crypto debit card, it either doesn't exist or these guys just don't have access to it. not in 2017 but whatever these guys just want to be rich and they're gonna do whatever it takes to make that happen and so they come up with this whole ass scam First, they set up a company called Centratech, completely fake and made up. They make a company website and they make themselves the employees. Here's actually a picture of the three of them all dressed up like they know what they're doing. Then, to make themselves appear more credible, they create fake LinkedIn profiles for themselves, claiming that they're all Harvard graduates. They even make up a fake CEO of this fake company.
Like they literally Google the words old white guy and they find a random picture and they post that picture of that guy as the CEO. And so all of this looks legit. And now all they got to do is promote it. So they all go into crypto message boards and chat rooms and they start hyping up their fake company hoping to get people to invest. Here's the thing, though. Some people do actually invest in this company. Not a ton, but, you know, it's something. But about a month or so in, suddenly, pow, their company gets a random endorsement from a somewhat known crypto guru. And overnight, kaboom, their company blows the f*** up. And suddenly, all kinds of people are investing. And they now have millions of dollars invested in their fake company based on a technology that they don't have.
but now there's a real buzz around what they're claiming centra tech is going to do so they just run with it they get a legit office space so they don't have to work out of their bedrooms anymore they hire like 50 other employees to come work for them they get these fake centra cards made to use as like promotional materials like a proof of concept they even hire celebrities to endorse this card Like here's Floyd Mayweather endorsing it. They get DJ Khaled to promote it. And so this builds even more hype for their company and makes them look even more legit. Now, what are they gonna do with all this hype for their company considering their product is fake? They're going to try and raise even more investment money.
And this is where they start selling CentraCoin, their coin, to the public. And so, bam, their coin goes live. And it's selling fast because they've been generating a lot of hype. And soon, Ray and his friends have raised tens of millions of dollars. And now with all this new money, they gotta start spending it. And so Ray is out here buying new tailored suits. He's at the mall shopping every day. He gets a new luxury car. He's always like carrying around tons of cash on himself for some reason. I guess just to like show it off. Meanwhile, the guys, they're all promising their investors like, yeah, don't worry, we're going to get these crypto debit cards out by Christmas. But again, they don't have crypto debit cards because these guys don't have the technology.
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