The new season of the series mentions pyramid scams, including the Bitconnect case. Each chapter of the documentary series explains different concepts around money.
Netflix recently released a new season of its mini-documentary series focused on money issuing, which is also part of the series «In a few words» launched back in 2018. In the recent instalment of five episodes, they detail concepts around the credit card business and gambling, including famous scams that happened to cryptocurrencies.
Quick Money is the name of the first chapter in this series; this episode explains how different these kinds of scams are. The documentary is based on the idea that the promise of easy wealth has always been something very tempting.
The easy wealth promise is always attractive even if it’s under a cloak of mystery, as can be the case with cryptocurrencies. The chapter directly mentions the OneCoin scam, a supposed cryptocurrency that promised to be the ultimate executor of bitcoin, according to its biggest sponsor, Ruja Ignatova, “The Queen of cryptocurrencies.”
OneCoin is a pyramid scam that offered great benefits with a supposed cryptocurrency that would change everything. The main goal was to increase the initial investment twice. The more people someone brought, the more “onecoins” they would get.
The scandal came to light in 2019 when the “Crypto Queen” disappeared completely, and his brother, who would have been leading OneCoin at the time, admitted his guilt in the fraud with the alleged cryptocurrency.
In addition to OneCoin, within the chapter viewers can also find another mention of a famous Ponzi scheme called Bitconnect, along with a clip where investor Carlos Matos can be seen shouting his famous phrase “BitConnect!”
How Scams Work in Times Like These
In January 2009, a worldwide event occurred, Bitcoin began its functions, a cryptocurrency that came to turn the wheel in the financial world.
Bitcoin brought different ways of handling money, but also new and confusing concepts. These concepts, “Blockchain”, “Mempool”, “Public and private keys” were some of the names that new users had to understand to use this new currency.
As the series explains how scams use uncertainty as an advantage to develop their fraudulent web. All of them tend to thrive in certain moments where a change can happen. When something new paves its way to users. When this new thing approaches, and reaches users with low knowledge on the matter, then the greatest proliferation of deceptions occurs.
scams are becoming a common activity, and although the method seems to always be the same, the vehicle to make this crime happen changes. More than 100 years ago Carlos Ponzi popularized his infamous fraud.
Four decades after the fall of the original scam in 1920 Bernard Madoff would create the largest Ponzi scheme in all of history, which worked for more than 40 years. At the time of his arrest in 2008, this scam was responsible for generating a total capital of 650 million dollars.
By: Jenson Nuñez
