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Cryptocurrency Exit Scams with Aaron Lammer

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“Exit scams go back hundreds of years but the new twist of cryptocurrency is that it is very easy to disappear with the money.” - Aaron Lammer Click To Tweet

We often make the assumption that if something is the biggest or the oldest, it should be trusted or it wouldn’t have grown so large. But when it comes to cryptocurrency, this may not always be true. 

Today’s guest is Aaron Lammer. Aaron is the founder of Treats Media which produces original podcasts and work for clients. Original works include the critically-acclaimed mini-series Exit Scams and multiple seasons of Stoner and CoinTalk. Aaron is also the co-founder of Longform.com and host of the Longform Podcast.

“This speaks to the internet as a whole. People don’t really know how the sausage they’re consuming is made.” - Aaron Lammer Click To Tweet

Show Notes:

“When crypto is going up, people want to put money into an exchange. When cryptocurrency crashes, everyone wants to pull out of the exchange.” - Aaron Lammer Click To Tweet

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Transcript:

I've just started to listen to your podcast about exit scams, or at least exit scam ploy. Are you going to do a second season?

We'll see. It hasn't taken long for history to repeat itself so there's plenty of opportunities, more to document.

OK, this will be awesome. Let's limit our discussion to cryptocurrency exit scams for the time being. What is a cryptocurrency exit scam?

I think if you’ve heard about a large amount of money being lost in crypto, very often the story will be someone got hacked, an exchange got hacked, and therefore doesn't have the customer’s money.

In a lot of these scenarios that have played out over the last half-decade or so, it's later been clear that maybe the exchange wasn't hacked by external forces, but in fact, insiders either took the money or had previously taken the money and lost it in some way. The hacking is actually a false narrative to escape the consequences of either theft or a loss of funds.

Sometimes they really are hacked. The founders usually disappear with the money and make various excuses about why they can't give people their money, and very rarely face consequences honestly for doing so because the legality of this stuff across different jurisdictions is very different.

If there's one common theme, it's that there isn't a ton of enforcement for stealing people's money if it's in cryptocurrency. In fact, most legal systems are not really prepared to deal with cases like this very effectively. What ends up happening is there are jurisdictions in the Caribbean where you're unlikely to get extradited back to the US for a shaky case of stealing from your own exchange. It ends up being a pretty high risk to reward crime for people who are involved in cryptocurrency.

If there's one common theme, it's that there isn't a ton of enforcement for stealing people's money if it's in cryptocurrency. -Aaron Lammer Click To Tweet

There's a new twist on the old theme because exit scams go back hundreds of years. There are 1800 exit scams we could talk about. The cryptocurrency twist is that it’s very easy to literally disappear with the money now.

Ironically, because of the way the blockchain works, people coming after you can see where a lot of the money went. In the case of Quadriga, which I spent the last couple of years looking into, it was very difficult to figure out what happened to the co-founder who disappeared, but I'm much more confident about what happened to the money embezzled because the evidence is on the blockchain.

Let's talk about who was Quadriga, how long was it around, and what happened with it.

It was the largest exchange in Canada when it still existed. It was run by a guy named Gerald Cotten, who founded it when he was 25 years old with another guy. By the end of his time at Quadriga, he was basically running the exchange as a one-man band, although it’s unclear whether some of his customers were really aware of that.

He took a honeymoon trip to India with his new wife and got sick very rapidly. He had Crohn's disease and he died, or at least the official narrative is that he died in Jaipur in December 2018. After he died, various suspicious things came out that led people to doubt some elements of that official story.

If I remember right, the amount of crypto that disappeared was around $250 million, give or take?

Yeah, I think it depends on whether dollars or Canadian dollars, but it's between $200 million and $250 million at the prices in December 2018. For anyone who's followed what's happened to crypto since 2018, that's in the billions now. One of the tragic elements of frauds like these is that the money people lost as denominated in Bitcoin or Ether just keeps scaling up over time.

Someone, who several years ago, lost $100,000, it would have been, depending on which currency it was, a $1 million or several million dollars now.

Yeah, and the people who lost money in Quadriga are trying to fight just to get back pennies on the dollar of what they had in there, and simultaneously the amount that they would have had is getting bigger and bigger.

I assume the only ones who are really getting money back are the lawyers who are dealing with the whole scenario.

I won't personally comment, but I will say that is a sentiment I've heard from many customers who lost money. I will say for my part, that the people who were brought in who were not criminal investigators but were forensic accountants were hired by lawyers. They’re still young. They found a lot of stuff. To their credit, they probably figured this out far more than anyone else, basically using the only clues being the financial records of what had happened at Quadriga. They were able to reverse engineer a lot of the story, literally seeing how money flowed out from the exchange into the founder's pockets.

Let's talk a little bit about how does a one-man band run an operation that has, in theory, $250,000 of assets and nobody seems to realize there's just one guy?

I think this kind of speaks to the internet as a whole—that people don't really know how the sausage they're consuming is made. The people who did know Gerald Cotten were convinced by him. He resembled what they expected a tech guru to be. He was a young guy, he looked younger than he was. He was good at talking about Bitcoin and he was Canadian.

I don't mean to generalize, but a lot of Canadians told me that one reason they trusted him as he was Canadian, and it was a Canadian exchange. There's this other thing that crypto is so new. Another reason people told me they trusted Quadriga was that it was the oldest Bitcoin exchange in Canada.

It was only a few years old, but it's hard to explain to someone outside crypto, but it actually looked less sketchy than its competitors, which were even newer than it.

That makes sense. In any industry, people are going to tend to gravitate to the organizations that have been around the longest, that seemed to have a track record. When it's an emerging technology, three years is a long time.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy when you become the biggest exchange, you become the most trusted exchange because people must have trusted you to make you the biggest exchange.

One thing I did learn in investigating this story is that Gerald Cotten, the founder, was using fake sockpuppeting accounts to trade with his own customers. Those sockpuppet accounts accounted for, at times, more than 30% of the volume of the exchange. Even the idea that it was the largest exchange, which made people trust it, was itself a piece of theater, especially early in the life of Quadriga, faking a tremendous amount of the volume itself made the exchange look legit.

When something has been around for a while and is large, it seems trustworthy.

For clarity, for the listeners and for myself, do you mean he was the buyer and the seller for a whole bunch of transactions to make it look like there were more transactions than there really were?

Often actually, he was only the buyer. He was just taking money and basically buying Bitcoin from his customers at Ethereum using fake funds. He would credit himself with Canadian dollars in these fake accounts and then buy real crypto, which moved real crypto into this account and fake Canadian dollars that he couldn’t actually payout in a bank run into their account, and it simulated fake volume.

Actually, Quadriga is known within cryptocurrencies for having high prices paid for Bitcoin. I used arbitrage to trade on Quadriga because it consistently had a higher price for Bitcoin than other exchanges. We now know why. There was a guy who would always buy Bitcoin and would always want to buy more Bitcoin, even as people asked for more money for the Bitcoin.

All of these weird mysteries about Quadriga have an actual rational explanation. There was a guy in the background playing all of the strings, puppeteering, basically, what was happening on the exchange.

Has it ever been confirmed to be an exit scam or is there still a possibility whether or not his death was real or fake? Does the exchange itself look to be a Ponzi scheme?

I would say that whether Gerald Cotten is still alive or not is tangential to the fact that he was running an active multi-year fraud that has a lot of the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme on his customers. I think his plan was to always do that. He very much set things up that way from early on.

He had experience running Ponzi schemes as a teenager. His Ponzi schemes, and very similar to how Quadriga ends, which he said, “Oh, I was invested in these other high-yield investment programs.” He'll say, “My high-yield investment program was actually invested in this other high-yield investment program, and they got seized. You lost your money, but I'm going to try to pay people back by doing another high-yield investment program.”

“I invested in a scam, and that scam fell through, so I'm going to invest in another scam to pay you back for the scam that you're currently involved in.”

This is a trademark late Ponzi scheme move, which is to basically re-hook people to say, “Hey, if you just wait a little longer, you don't report me, if you just maybe put in a little bit more money, I have another way that I can give you back all of the money.” He was running these over time.

Illegal investment scams or ponzi schemes take money from new investors to pay off earlier investors

Quadriga itself resembles one of these schemes where at the end, he had leached so many funds out that he would have to wait to pay out withdrawals for people to deposit. This is a classic endgame of a Ponzi scheme in which the outflow can never exceed the inflow.

When the inflow starts getting throttled and more people want to hold money out, which is what happens during a crypto crash. When crypto is going up, everyone wants to put money into an exchange. When crypto crashes, everyone wants to pull their money out of the exchange. This is what happened in early 2018 and probably caused a pretty catastrophic situation at Quadriga, which would have put him very close to being revealed as running a fractional reserve that couldn't pay out its debts.

That's particularly scary when it's an “investment” that most people probably don't really understand.

There's also this strange layer where Bitcoin and Ethereum are one thing and they're supposed to be there. In this case, they're not. With an exchange, there are always dollars. In the case of Canadians, Canadian dollars. People have to sell their Bitcoin for dollars to get out. They need to put in dollars to buy Bitcoin in the first place.

A big chunk of what an exchange is holding is actually going to be dollars. It's very sketchy where those are at any given period of time. They theoretically should be sitting in a bank account, but we know that most banks won't deal with Bitcoin exchanges.

Nowadays, stablecoins have, in some ways, filled that realm, but for a long time, there was a lot of smoke and mirrors as to where the money that was supposed to be there in dollar form really was. That continues honestly with Tether and various other crypto fires waiting to happen, where there's a bunch of digital dollars that are supposed to be somewhere represented in a bank account with actual money.

Did the investigators figure out where all the money went? Were they the ones who figured out that he was effectively just printing his own money to buy currency from people?

They were able to trace a pretty good portion of the money that he actually took out and put onto other exchanges, some of which he gambled and lost on large leverage trades, some of which he actually cashed out and bought a lot of houses in Canada.

Beyond that, there was another sum of money that was mysterious where it was like, we located half the money, but half of the money is outstanding and that's one of the reasons people might think he might be alive—it’s that there's this unaccounted chunk of money that someone could have.

One of our other episodes addresses that money, and I won't spoil it for people who aren’t too far along, but don't get your hopes up that a lifelong scammer has somehow saved a bunch of the money. For someone like you who follows stories like these, you're probably in the back of your mind going, “I bet that money isn't still around.”

I suspect even if it was, it's not going to be accessible. If he really did die, it doesn't matter whether it exists or not—no one is going to be able to touch it.

The theme of this story is a person who could have been rich simply by being involved in cryptocurrency in the first place very early, but tried to shoot the moon by both stealing his customers’ money, and far more so, making huge bets with his customers' money.

When you asked, was it an exit scam, I think the optimistic read was basically placing a bet that was most of his customers' money on the cryptocurrency markets. If that bet had hit, he could have paid everyone out and be billionaire rich. Sadly, that bet did not hit.

That seems to be a common theme with Ponzi schemes is the person who's running it is, “Well, if I just make this one bet and it goes through, the hero that I appeared to have been for so long, I will actually be because the funds will be there to support withdrawals.”

I would say that's the most common theme across different exit scams I've heard of. That the take that is most generous to the person is that it was a form of gambling gone wrong.

Do you know what the total final payout—cents on the dollar—is for the investors or the account holders?

I think they found around $40 million. This was money that was being held by payment processors that hadn't gone and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce had frozen about $26 million of this money.

I don't think $40 million will be going back to the customers. We've already addressed the legal fees. Not only is it a small amount of money, but it's big years that would probably be more years before any of this gets tied up.

The best-case scenario is $0.15 to the dollar, assuming the lawyers and forensic analysts don't get anything. I think if I remember right, Bernie Madoff, who's considered one of the largest Ponzi schemes, was actually able to get back a significantly large portion of the funds.

While it was a Ponzi scheme, the money was actually still out there. He hadn't spent it all. There were assets that could be sold, accounts that could be transferred back over. I don't know whether it was $0.80 or $0.50 on the dollar, but I think if after a scam, you get half of your money back, you're probably pretty happy.

It's easier to lose half of your money in cryptocurrency without even directly getting scammed.

That's true. You talked about these exit scams, at least within crypto, come when there are large drops on the market. We're recording in late June and I think in the last week, there probably have been across—was it Bitcoin is down 30%, I think, 50% in the last couple weeks. A number of other currencies have seen sharp drops. You seem to be indicating earlier that there's another exchange looking to be an exit scam?

I think there have actually been two exit scams since we've been airing this show, which is only six or seven weeks. I remember when Exit Scam debuted. Right around when we debuted the show, a Turkish exchange called Thodex, the CEO made off with, I believe, $2 billion, was last seen in the Istanbul airport, boarded a flight to Albania, and, as far as I know, was still at large.

I believe a lot of members of his family have been arrested in Turkey. I think some of them worked on the exchange and also, perhaps, that's a tactic to get him to return to Turkey, but he's still out there.

Then this week, this is how it's being reported, and I'm suspicious of some of these figures. What's being reported is a South African exchange called Africrypt—the two founders took off with $3.6 billion, which would make it the largest exit scam in history. It gets crazier. They're 17 and 21 years old, and they have fled to the UK. I think they're believed to be in London.

I think they actually sent out a letter in April that said, “Hey, we've lost access to your money. We got hacked. Don't go to the authorities, we are trying to get the money back, but it's going to screw it up if people go to the authorities.”

When I've read more about this story, it sounds to me more like a Ponzi scheme than an exchange. I've seen some screengrabs of their app and how it worked. They're offering 10% daily returns.

Yeah, that's a red flag.

Just set off the sirens there. Actually, I've read they have two programs. There's a passive and an aggressive program. I believed the aggressive was 10% daily returns. They set off all of my alarms because this is the kind of stuff Gerald Cotten was doing when he was a teenager. In fact, literally around this age, he was running high-yield investment programs.

Often in a Ponzi scheme, you'll have inflated daily returns or monthly returns and an explanation of how these returns are generated. In the case of Africrypt, it was that they were trading crypto using AI. This is a copy about AI, a copy off of a boilerplate. It's total gibberish. These are basically two kids in high school saying, “I develop a proprietary AI trading method that's delivering 10% daily returns.”

Apparently, a bunch of South African celebrities were involved in Africrypt. There were a fair amount of people referring to other people from what I've heard. It sounds like a giant Ponzi scheme going bust. I wonder if the $3.6 billion is actually how much money they have or how money should have been there with people getting 10% daily returns and even letting them compound very easily can go from a couple of hundred million to some several billion. That math snowballs very quickly. It will be interesting to see how much people actually had and if it was really billions, but either way, that's a pretty wild story.

I don't think it's surprising that whatever they were doing culminated during this crash. It tends to shake out the weak stories that don't have enough money to keep paying. If they were actually paying people out 10% daily returns and anyone was withdrawing, that would take a lot of money out of the account pretty quickly.

Yeah, very quickly. I think that makes sense. I have listened to an investor and what he talked about now, this is for legitimate investing not for scams. This is not investment advice, but his general thought in the way that he viewed investing is that the human mind is wired the opposite of what you should do.

When prices go down, people panic. They've lost money. “I'm going to get the rest of my money out so I don't lose the rest of it.” When the cryptocurrency drops, there's a run of people withdrawing their money. It forces the price down even lower, which causes it to crash even more. If you're a platform that doesn't really have the money behind what you say it has, all of a sudden people are taking money out of your accounts that doesn't exist.

It’s ironic because just holding cryptocurrency has been a pretty good bet through most of the time cryptocurrency exists and yet still people will accept an even greater degree of risk to go into these Ponzi schemes, like Africrypt that pay even more than actual crypto returns. That's kind of a theme. If I were to say so, anything that unites all of these frauds, it's the aspiration for otherworldly returns that leads people down these paths. There are actually pretty safe ways to buy and hold Bitcoin and Ethereum right now. I don't think Coinbase is going to exit scam you. They have publicly traded stock. It's just not worth it, I think.

There are some legitimate companies that are real brick-and-mortar investment houses that you can now buy and sell crypto through. Maybe not the full range of options you might have at other places, but they are legitimate organizations that are backed by billions and billions of real dollars in the bank.

If you’re going to hold money at an exchange…interact with an exchange that could cover your loss if they screw something up. -Aaron Lammer Click To Tweet

I know the hardcore advice is to hold your own key as a hardware wallet. I think that's great if you want to be serious about holding serious amounts of crypto, I would do that. In lieu of that, if you are going to hold money at an exchange or at least interact with an exchange, you want to interact with an exchange that could cover your loss if they screw something up.

Someone like Coinbase actually has enough money—not if they lose all of the Bitcoin they have—but if something goes wrong, it's more just in their interest to make it right than it is to take off if something goes wrong.

Unfortunately, it’s a form of centralization, but I think if you deal with exchanges, actually go with the biggest exchange. Of course, Quadriga […] this rule, so don't listen to me.

It's kind of funny because I think cryptocurrency and what's been going with cryptocurrency since its inception, realistically, kind of violates a lot of the rules that I would normally give to people as my opinion about investments of like, if they claim that you're going to make more than 10% a year, run for the hills. It's a scam.

I think Bitcoin was up 8% today so maybe that 10% daily return doesn't sound so crazy if you're looking at a single day, but how can you do it day after day after day after day?

It's also the difference between guaranteeing returns versus saying, “Hey, if you stick to this, you'll probably do well over time. You'll also have a negative 50% month at some point and you also have to stomach that.” As you said, it's all good advice except panic-selling during crashes, which is the most human. It's human to Ponzi and it's human to panic-sell.

I could make the argument of when the concern is cryptocurrencies can run to zero. There are circumstances that can potentially happen.

I would say, viewed over a 10-year span, we should expect most cryptocurrencies to run zero just like if we looked at startups in 2010 and what is still alive right now, 90%+ of that ecosystem has to die every decade. Most of these things are complete winner-take-all markets. We're talking over Skype, how many dead startups did Skype and Zoom leave in their wake.

A ton.

I remember when people would always have weird off-brand video chat opportunities.

Now people even talk about Microsoft Teams, I think what it is. It's like, what's that? Microsoft, it's one of the biggest companies in the world. It’s one of the most well-known names in software. You don't know about their video chat platform? The one that they built as opposed to what they bought.

There are some echoes between changes. Building a video platform is really hard. Whatever Skype and Zoom are doing to concurrently keep up eight million streams in HD, it's basically what you want from a crypto exchange, or any company that is dealing with something that's extremely can't have any errors at it. It has to work at 100% uptime and without any problems.

It has to deal with panic-ups and panic-downs.

Honestly, that is the issue with crypto. At the times when crypto is crashing, Coinbase has been down, heavily. They’re like, “You can't trade.” That's a big problem.

That's the same thing that we saw with the popular stock trading app Robinhood in the US, is that when the market started dropping due to the pandemic and a few other times, ups and downs, they've had a hard time keeping their platform operational. Of course, it always leads to the accusations of, “You're doing it at the behest of large corporations to help manipulate the stock values.”

This is, to me, why the most interesting thing happening in cryptocurrency is these dexes—these decentralized exchanges—that both often have complete uptime all the time in which there's no third party that you're working through. You're basically just using smart contracts to do transactions. While that's a freaky idea a few years ago, now I think I would rather have a smart contract than an exchange that's maybe being run by one guy.

What advice would you give, which is not financial—we're not offering financial advice here—if someone is looking to use an exchange or looking to buy cryptocurrency—what are the things they should specifically be watching out for?

You want to go with main, brand exchanges that are large and can afford to pay you back. -Aaron Lammer Click To Tweet

I think you want to go with main, brand exchanges that are large and can afford to pay you back. I would watch out for exchanges that heavily incentivize signing up and give a lot of bonuses. People who are also heavily pushing affiliate links for exchanges. All of those are red flags for me.

I look at it as something like your calendar and like Google calendar, Apple calendar, some I've never heard of—that’s not what I want to go with. I think there's a few name-brand exchanges in most areas, and honestly, you have to go with regional exchange now because there are very few exchanges that are operating across international borders legally unless you're VPN-ing, which just like this isn’t investment advice, we won’t give you use of VPN advice.

Honestly, for me, the most interesting world is this defiant Ethereum world that doesn’t really run on company-owned exchanges anymore. It runs on these decentralized websites. If you're curious about that, I would check it out. It is actually an end-run around of the problems we are talking about, which are human problems.

There's always a problem if you give people exposure to a billion dollars that they can run off with. It's not crypto. Any setting where that's the setup, you're going to have problems and people are going to start succumbing to temptations.

Ideally, you just don't want to put a bunch of your money into someone else's pocket. The other thing is if you want to hold cryptocurrency in the long run, don't leave it on an exchange. Find either a hardware wallet—there’s a lot of good wallets—you can just keep it on the iPhone. Put your Bitcoin, put your Ethereum into a third-party wallet. MetaMask is free for Ethereum stuff.

I would watch out for exchanges that heavily incentivize signing up and give a lot of bonuses. -Aaron Lammer Click To Tweet

I think that's part of learning how it works, but it's also just like a good move. You can always put it right back on the exchange. A send is very cheap. You're just basically emailing yourself money from your built-in account to your own personal account, in a way.

If you go with public advice from Quadriga, make sure the password is written down somewhere.

Absolutely. Tell your loved one. This is actually a real thing, which is if you have a will, if you have a succession plan, you have a lot of assets in cryptocurrency somewhere, yeah, you should probably have a plan for it because this is starting to happen where people have millions of dollars in crypto and don't tell their partner, their kids, or whatever how to access it.

My hardware wallet comes with three little custom pieces of paper where you write down the seed phrase. I remember when they used to have phones, they had your 10-speed dials. You have three options here: Two people that you would trust with it or hiding it in two places and giving one to someone else. It's a terrible offset to give it to somebody else, honestly. I probably shouldn't give it to anyone else, but maybe tell them where you’ve got it hidden if you might not be making it too many more years.

I guess the other option is to make sure—I know there's a case in the news about a gentleman who accidentally threw away a Bitcoin wallet worth $70 million at that time, I think.

Don't do that.

He was paying people. I think he was offering a million-dollar bounty to whoever could find the wallet in the dump.

There's only going to be more stories of all of these kinds going forward, so be careful, I guess I would say. Don't put in so much money that you're going to have to look through a dump at some point in the future.

Yeah, what’s the advice? Don't put all your eggs in the same basket.

That's another thing that some people do—spread your crypto out over a bunch of different wallets, and then if something happens to one of these, it's not catastrophic. It's actually a pretty good strategy that people use.

Probably the other advice is if you can't afford to lose the money, you shouldn’t be involved in crypto.

I would say it's generally an experimental atmosphere. You don’t need to do it. If you feel like engaging in it, check it out, but I don't feel people need to be drawn into something that is inherently risky. When I say it's inherently risky, I don't even mean the price. I mean the whole thing is inherently slightly risky. It's kind of one of the things that makes it interesting and makes crazy stories like these, but it also makes it precarious if you’ve got money that's important to you.

Yeah, that's absolutely crazy. How many episodes of your podcast are you planning on putting out?

There are eight episodes. The last episode comes out Monday, Chapter 8, so it's a great time to start binging. You can find it at exitscam.show or just search for Exit Scam on the podcast app of your choice.

Do you have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, if people want to get a hold of you and learn more about it? Or are you social media-agnostic?

No, I'm @aaronlammer. I usually tweet out all of my various podcasts. You can follow all the weird stuff I get into there.

That will be awesome. We’ll definitely make sure to link to all your social media accounts, link to your podcast. I've started listening and you are a great storyteller. I love just hearing these stories, these true-life stories of things that just go really, really wrong.

Totally.

Aaron, thank you so much for coming on the Easy Prey Podcast today.

Thank you for having me. It was a blast.

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