Ben McKenzie suspected there was something suspicious about crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried long before anyone else did.
The actor known for Gotham and The O.C., who earned a degree in economics from the University of Virginia, turned his attention to the study of cryptocurrency during the pandemic. Unlike millions of others who have evangelized for crypto, he came to view digital currency as fundamentally unsound and rife with fraud – case in point Bankman-Fried, who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange that at one time was valued in the billions of dollars.
McKenzie wrote a book about it – Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, co-authored with Jacob Silverman – and as part of his research he reached out to Bankman-Fried for an interview. Perhaps surprisingly, Bankman-Fried agreed, and without conditions. Their on-camera interview is a key…
Cyber fraud uses technology as the primary weapon. It is highly scalable and can be conducted from anywhere in the world.
- Phishing/Smishing/Vishing: Using deceptive emails (phishing), text messages (smishing), or phone calls (vishing) to trick victims into clicking malicious links or revealing sensitive data.
- Business Email Compromise (BEC): A high-value scam where a criminal impersonates a CEO or high-level executive via a “spoofed” email address to trick a staff member into making an urgent, unauthorized wire transfer.