Reflecting on Scams and Characters

Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His new book is Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.

“I have a rule of thumb, which is that if somebody did one scam, they probably did another scam. If they did one scam in the past and now they have a new thing, odds are good it’s also a scam. That’s not always true, but that was definitely borne out sometimes in crypto-world.”

Show notes:

• @ZekeFaux
• zekefaux.com
• Faux on Longform
• Faux’s Bloomberg archive
• 06:00 “Secret Network Connects Harvard Money to Payday Loans” (Bloomberg • Sept 2014)
• 08:00 “Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?” (Bloomberg • Oct 2021)
• 21:00 Matt Levine’s Bloomberg archive
• 22:00 “‘Don’t You Remember Me?’ The Crypto Hell on the Other Side of a Spam Text” (Bloomberg • Aug 2023)
• 32:00 “The Rise of FTX, and Sam Bankman-Fried, Was a Great Story. Its Implosion Is Even Better.” (Alexandra Alter • New York Times • May 2023)
• 58:00 The Mastermind (Evan Ratliff • Penguin Random House • 2020)

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