[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to Crypto Talk Radio, the podcast for everyday investors like you. Visit us on the
[email protected] and now here's your host, Leister.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Thank you for that, Bailey. And welcome everybody out there in Crypto Talk radio
[email protected] if I sound a little bit strange today, I will apologize. I have a minor issue that I'm tussling with, but hopefully it comes across reasonably loud and clear.
Welcome. Welcome back.
Today's episode will be slim. I'm going to veer a little bit into a topic I had committed to doing and then realized I did not do it. So I'm going to do it.
But it's around scam again because it occurred to me that there are people that simply don't.
They're so narrow focused on their definition of scam and despite my every effort, I cannot get them to open up their mind and broaden their horizon about what scam means. So I'm going to be talking a little bit about that topic.
For now. Let's talk a little bit crypto and then we'll get after the jump.
Coinmarketcap.com we will zoom out to the month chart and start with bitcoin, which is currently hovering just shy of the 67,000 doll mark, with a slight upward trend that's got people skeptical.
Apparently there are rejection points just below 66,000 where there's a risk things going back down. The upward trend is not strong, so it would not surprise me if it did go back down.
But I am curious to watch over the next week or so to see if there's a fake out. That's always, always possible when you're seeing something like this. Meanwhile, Ethereum, just shy of $2,000 mark, has a much stronger upward trend if there's recovery seems to be much more powerful than bitcoins for reasons I cannot say. I don't want to speculate, but I do think there's international events and things that may be contributing to it, not knowing for sure.
Keep an eye on Ethereum. I think Ethereum's got something. It's got something to offer here in the near future for sure.
In other news, the Clarity act recently had a little bit of controversy because it missed its initial deadline, which is July this month. We're about to be over with July, so the only final one is then August 1st, I think first or second week August for the Clarity Act. Senator Loomis, who's out of Wyoming, I believe, chimed in and caused a little bit of Hype. But, you know, I wanted to explain what she's trying to get at, but she tweeted, you know, hey, your, your crypto's yours. And you know, you're, if you pass this, you're going to be protected. And what she was getting at is that there's a section inside the Clarity act that tries to make a distinction of ownership.
When there are cryptocurrencies that have been listed as part of a bankruptcy filing that's done by an organization. So let's say ftx, for example, there's coins locked up, tokens locked up. They are part of the bankruptcy proceeding because they're assets. They are assets. The question goes of who owns them. Not your keys, not your coins. If you. It's in the terms that the exchange will say, by giving it to us, we are taking custody of them.
You're giving us custody for the duration that we have it. What she's saying is that the Clarity act would make it clear that the custody maintains to the customer and when they're. Specifically when there's a bankruptcy process, that the bankruptcy process cannot then override the ownership interest of the customer.
Many people feel that this is not really a good interpretation of what's saying and that you cannot take away the custody provision because it does not let the exchange be an exchange. Either way. Suffice to say that rhymes that there's an open question about custody and ownership that's part of the Clarity Act.
Also speaking of custody, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, chimed in about ethics provisions that the Democrats are trying to put into the Clarity act as modifications to essentially say we know what they're doing. They don't want Trump to profit off crypto. He actually came out and supported the ethics.
Now he's already made a ton of money off it. That's why he didn't care. Right? His stance, it was clear there's no regulation, there's, I'm not doing anything wrong and until you pass regulation, I'm gonna keep on doing my thing. That's what he did.
Now he's saying, I back this primarily because he just wants to Clarity act pass. He just wants to have a win because he had a hard time with the straight Hormuz issues and everything else. So I don't think that, I don't think it's pandering, but I do think it's a little bit self serving to a degree.
Once again, he's already profited off not having regulations in place.
World Liberty Financial, which essentially was a pump and dump. He made crazy amounts of money off that one. He's made crazy amounts of money on his other businesses. So I think from his lens, what's the problem? Go ahead, have at it. You know, kill the, kill the business, whatever. And I said that I don't think clarity is going to be the positive that people think it is.
I think everybody's just waiting for some catalyst of any kind. But I don't think clarity is it from my lens. I don't think that it's it.
For the remainder of the episode, I told you to be slim. But for the remainder of the episode, we are going to talk a little bit more about scams. And this I'll just caveat for those that are sick of it. This will be the last time I try to help people open up their minds.
The truth is that not everybody is open minded. They're not willing to open up their mind and look at it from a fresh perspective. So since they're not willing to, there's no reason to try to encourage those people to do so because they're not going to do it.
There's too much around the word scam that is being misunderstood.
If we accept a simple definition. Bear with me for a moment. Okay. If we accept a simple definition that a scam must include intent to take money from you, if we accept that we cannot then call everything a scam. We have to also separate. When somebody is just inept, we have to separate word like with Donald Trump, we have to separate where that person is. There's no law preventing what he did. So we have to look at these different buckets of situations where people are losing money and stop putting a blanket scam over top of it.
And I figured I would regale you, look it up with a little bit of a story that might help outline where I'm going with that and why It's. It just isn't that simple. And if we, if we can train ourselves to think of it in this lens, I think it gives us a better opportunity to appreciate how we can keep ourselves safe, how we can learn from what's out there, how we can study these empirical examples and use them to measure certain projects that are out there before we just leap to the word scam.
Everybody knows by now Jeffrey Epstein.
What you've heard about Jeffrey Epstein mostly centers around females.
This idea that he had underage girls out there doing who knows what.
Now, the media has not spoken about the facts of the matter. They have only focused on what they think are smoking guns that aren't really because the facts of the matter with Jeffrey Epstein with regards to the girls, there are girls that are on record saying and by the way, Ashley Massaro who worked for WWE before she committed suicide, before she had worked to wwe, she was one of Epstein's girls.
Now the truth is some of these girls have openly admitted they chose to go out and do what they were doing.
They chose it because the money was good or there was an opportunity or they got to meet celebrities or they were starry eye. You know he young though. You know, that's the excuses. They were young and stupid. The media does not focus in that direction to say these girls were impressionable, sure. But they have to own some accountability for their decisions in that regard. Everything is around Epstein bad, Trump bad, Clinton bad, etc so on.
And then Chris Tucker and all these other celebrities that happen to be mentioned in some email or happen to have flown on the plane at one point and then the media is creating some narrative that's the conclusion born of nothing really. The only one that has anything close to sketchy is Bill Clinton because he was depicted for some reason. I don't know why photos were taken and why he allowed it, but depicted in some pool with a bunch of girls that clearly weren't his wife. Like there's crazy stuff like this, but by and large the Epstein situation is focused on the girls and these salacious things. And nobody has talked about all the other things that Epstein did do that were actual crimes where you could actually make a case because there was actual evidence of it that he was never actually prosecuted for.
And no, for some of those that get crazy knocked off like gamefaqs who went woke ever since they were brought up by fandom.
I am not dismissing the female side of it. I'm saying I find it ironic. Nobody's speaking about the financial side of it because the financial side of it is where real crimes took place that nobody's talking about that he was never charged for.
It is a rabbit hole.
And you may have heard the term six degrees of separation. Such has never been so much more the case as with Jeffrey Epstein.
This was my story. I'm going to veer a little bit and I will come back to the the crux of the matter.
Did you know how Jeffrey Epstein got wealthy?
The bottom line of how Jeffrey Epstein got wealthy. Jeffrey Epstein happened to have been introduced by a contractor. The contractor happened to have been involved with somebody else who had been involved with Epstein and kind of took Epstein under the wing. And Epstein, he was looked at As a brilliant person, he was looked at as very smart, he was very go getter, he had energy, etc. So on this contractor makes an introduction to another person. So now you're in the 40s, 40s, 50s, 60s, to another person named Stephen Hoffenberg. I challenge you to look up Stephen Hoffenberg. Stephen Hoffenberg ultimately died. He was 70 something years old. He was found dead. They said natural causes.
Whether you accept that or not, it's whatever that was just four years ago.
Hoffenberg.
The interesting thing about the whole Hoffenberg business, Hoffenberg had created, so think Bernie Madoff, right?
Bernie Madoff was basically Ponzi definition, taking money and then using the money to entice new people and then fake returns and everything else. Hoffenberg took a different route.
He created a debt collection agency.
If you think about debt collection, what it does, debt collection goes to all these different organizations where they've got delinquent customers though business or consumer, and they will purchase the debt.
So by purchasing the debt, what are they doing? They'll say, we will give you X amount of money so that it's off your books. We'll take over that debt, put it on our books, and they might charge a fee for this service.
The point is that they will then take on the debt collection activities to go and get that person, even do legal actions, etc. Or they'll wrap them up into securities and then sell them. Now, part of this, part of, not all, but part of this contributed to the housing bubble 2008. Not specifically Hoffenberg, just in a vacuum. I'm saying the idea of purchasing debts and selling debts and wrapping debts into securities contributed to the bubble. In 2008, Hoffenberg was already well in advance of an opportunity that he saw to purchase debt instruments, create a debt collection agency performance on debt collections, go after them, and then where he couldn't wrap them into securities on side, the SEC was monitoring him the entire time. The SEC in 93, so that he was old by this point. In 93, they were going after him. He pled guilty.
They said, this is a blatant Ponzi scheme. Now again, consider if you have a debt collection agency and you say to this company, I will guarantee you this, you know, on it, if they were just purchasing the debt straight over, those companies were made whole.
Allegedly. I don't know specifics, but allegedly he was making promises to other agencies versus a straight payout. And that's what the SEC got him on. Well, it turns out in the Middle of all this chaos.
In the middle of all this chaos.
So prior to him getting this, he had been involved with Jeffrey Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein through that introduction to the defense contractor.
Apparently this is what I don't know the specifics on, but apparently leading up to this debt collection agency, that some of the formation, management and strategy was Epstein's idea. That the real mastermind behind this alleged Ponzi scheme was Jeffrey Epstein, not Hoffenberg.
The money was rolling so well, allegedly Hoffenberg set him up with wealthy pads all over the place, was paying him $25,000 a month.
You might think that's it's a lot of money to the regular person. But it was a fraction of what Epstein would later be making through all the jewelry and the Saudis, which I'll talk about here a second.
But he also gave him a two million dollar loan that he would not need to pay back. This is the late 80s. This is just as like five, six years before this debt collection crash and burn so millions of dollars of a quote, loan that he would not have to pay back.
Setting him up in wealthy business buildings.
At the time, right around, you may or may not be aware of Pan Am.
Pan Am was at one point one of the largest airlines in the 90s.
In one of the largest airlines that there was in its. In its tail end. I'm talking at the end. Prior to it's been around for 100 years. But prior to it was one of the largest airlines.
Allegedly, Hoffenberg and Epstein tried to buy Pan Am.
The only reason they could not buy Pan Am is the Lockerbie bombing. The Lockerbie bombing is where Flight 103 at Pan Am bombed over Lockerbie. It's a town. I think it's Scotland.
But the only reason that they did, they were not successful in this acquisition is because of the Lockerbie bombing.
Now here's where I get into this situation of a six degrees of separation that rhymes.
I mentioned the Saudis with Jeffrey Epstein.
Part of this situation with Epstein and Hoffenberg included Adnan Khashoggi.
If the last name sounds familiar, it should because Admin. Khashoggi, he passed away in 2017.
Was a businessman, wealthy, whole nine.
His nephew, Jamal Khashoggi.
You're like, that's the last familiar last name. It should.
Jamal Khashoggi was the reporter, if you remember, this was the reporter that got. I think they choked him out. They strangled him or something at the Saudi consulate.
That was the whole big thing. And then after this fallout, Khashoggi was Okay, how could they do this? The United States should go to war. And they named a street after this dude because he was a dissident. That's the only reason that they were doing it. Now, I want to remind you.
I want to remind you, we're dealing with the nephew of a very wealthy player that was involved with Jeffrey Epstein and to a lesser degree, Hoffenberg, but to Jeffrey Epstein, who was alleged to have potentially been orchestrating one of the. According to the sec, quote, one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in history.
Epstein never served. He never was charged. He never served any time for this financial crime. Hoffenberg, he was in and out of prison, and he maintained that Epstein was the mastermind behind this whole fiasco.
So you take Adnan Khashoggi, who's directly linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
Hoffenberg goes to prison.
Adam Khashoggi does not wealthy, does not nephew. Jamal Khashoggi gets choked out, but he's dissident. But the United States ultimately celebrates this. Not him getting killed, but celebrates him. Celebrates his dissidents and celebrates what he's pushing and completely does not. And I'm not suggesting Jamal was culpable of anything. I'm saying that I found it funny that years later, all of a sudden, there's focus on Epstein that's connected to this Khashoggi by way of his uncle. And nobody spoke about that at the time, even though it was well known.
So way back then in the 90s, when we knew about these connections, nobody spoke at all about Epstein. Nobody spoke about Epstein's connection to Hoffenberg. Nobody spoke about Epstein being allegedly part of the largest Ponzi scheme.
Nobody spoke about any of that. Nobody spoke about Jamal Khashoggi being the nephew of this other guy that was attached to Epstein.
And with the Locker B bombing. The Locker B bombing, they never did identify.
The theory was that the Libyan government had something to do with it. That was the theory at the time. They did. They did find some people guilty. I'm saying that they believed it was part of a larger plot that they never really truly sorted out.
The Libyan government paid families.
Some of the families refused the money because they didn't think Libyan was to blame. They didn't think Libya was to blame. They thought it was single points. They thought it was single terrorist factions.
It was never fully solved. President Bush passed an executive order that basically made it to where Libya could not be held responsible for something like this.
So now you got a bombing of an aircraft where the vast majority of people who died are U.S. citizens.
President Bush passes basically a get out of jail free card to Libya. I'm not suggesting Libya was or was not culpable. I'm saying I found it suspicious that President Bush passed that instead of saying, look, they already paid. Let them handle it. If. If this happens again, they should be held. They didn't do that. Didn't do that.
You got this. Jamal Kogi, Adnan Kogi, Jeffrey Epstein. No connections there made at the time.
You got, allegedly the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Epstein's not charged. Where am I going with it?
There was a lot of focus on the female aspects around Jeffrey Epstein and not hardly any around.
This is a guy. Just to refresh you. This is a guy who came from nothing. He literally came from nothing. He didn't have significant amounts of money when he early started out, and he just happened to meet the right people at the right places at the right time, who then took him under their wing because they saw that he was reasonably smart. And then all of a sudden, he ends up being one of the wealthiest people in the world. Arguably, he's living on his own island out there. Left alone for decades, despite being connected to these people, nobody bothered going after him. Allegedly, he was being watched by the CIA, but nobody bothered going after him. Nobody bothered saying anything about what was going on. And then you take all the people who were on the plane, whether they did anything or not, but all the people that were on the plane, and nobody said anything.
What I'm saying is, if we look at the core definition of scam, Jeffrey Epstein, according to what he was charged with, didn't scam anybody. According to what he was associated with, he did.
Those that. Those definitions were attributed from the government. They were from the sec.
Arguably, Hoffenberg acknowledged some of it, but he still maintained to the day he died that Epstein was ultimately the mastermind behind it and that they felt at the time that they could make it work just like Bernie Madoff did. When Bernie Madoff was in prison, he cut an interview, and he said the banks had to know what was going on. But I thought we could pull this off. I thought we did it, and then we were in over our heads. Before we knew it, the other guy covered same thing. We feel like we can fill it off so they know it's against some law. They just don't really care.
A lot of them feel like they can solve this practice mystery, and if they make it work, then it's not a Ponzi or it's not a Crime, that's kind of the thought process.
So when you have somebody like that and you go decades, and there's no action taken, there's no government anything that we know of, there's no direct action and connection to these people, and there's no mention nothing for decades, how can that be? How can it be that you end up then later, all that's focused on is women, right? And I'm not dismissing what happened. I'm saying that's your focus, not the financial crimes at all.
Maybe it's because they didn't think the financial crimes were that bad.
So if that's true, and I don't know it is, but that's true, they didn't think they were that bad.
Then I think about other projects in crypto where people claim losses, but they. They haven't lost or they chose to put in. See, with something like this, a debt collection, you didn't have a choice. If you went into debt with a company and your debts bought, you didn't have a choice in that matter. It's not your say, right? It just happens. There's nothing you can do about it.
How can then somebody say they were scammed if the business model was legal because it was Debt collections, debt purchases, all legal, it's all over all above board.
Making promises and claims and returns that you cannot substantiate is probably not. But the action of purchasing debt and debt collection is legal has been.
All I'm saying to you is that when we look at crypto projects or financial projects or stock projects or any projects, anything, we have to really step back. And before we start leaping to the word scam, we have to understand the intent.
We have to understand whether the government sees it as.
Just because you think it is doesn't mean it is.
What choice did you make to get in to whatever. If it was something that was out of your control, that's a different situation.
For example, Hotchko, which I talked about, people chose to buy in it because of the dog and the loyalty and all that. And I said, I'm not saying don't buy it. I'm saying make sure you sell and don't sit on it so that you hit a crossroads. And if you could sell and you chose not to, did you get scammed?
You lost money, so arguably, yes. Could it recover?
Maybe. But why would anybody buy into it when you see the pump and dump and there's sketchiness with the contract. My point is that the word scam can only apply after a certain action has been Taken specifically as the action has not been taken, the word scam is inappropriate.
If at a point you choose to get in and you cannot sell and nothing's gonna happen since, and that's gone, liquidity's gone, etc. A case can be made.
But if money goes in and things are delivered, they're just late.
You have to reevaluate it. I'm not saying don't. I'm saying reevaluate it. Saitama.
Saitama took money you could always sell the entire time through. They never locked the contract down, but they were dumping on your heads in the background. They were locked up by the FBI even though you were never stopped from selling. The most that happened was they dumped out on you.
A case could be made.
Did they really scam you?
They were caught in the boards pumping the artificially pumping wash, trading wash trades against the law.
But there were people who made a lot of money. Some of your most notable people on YouTube made a lot of money on Saitama.
Did they scam you?
I'm not denying how you feel or what you think or any of that about a project. I want you to simply be open minded.
When people are making. It's timing. Some people are. They're timing the market.
Some have inside knowledge, which is a problem. But other than that, if you're timing the market and you just happen to get lucky on it, it's why it's a. It's glorified casino. We just talked about that with Jason Hitchcock. Mr. Hitchcock talked about it feels like it's, you know, a form of gambling. That's what it is. What I said it is like lottery ticket. That's what it is. It's timing. Timing more than anything else. You know, lofty promises, there's opportunities, but you don't have the same protections.
Clarity act claims to create the protections. You can't prove it till it's out.
And even if it is out, it's already too late, you know, because we already turned off the mainstream.
And I don't think we're gonna get them back.
So if you are telling people that crypto's a scam, get out, don't get in it. That's your prerogative, you know, but I. I'd encourage you to think it through of what really is the definition of that. Because it may not be as simple as you might be making it.
Sam.
