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Investing in American companies from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries was a lot like investing in global crypto markets today.

Both settings were low on regulatory oversight. investing in global crypto markets today.

Both settings were low on regulatory oversight, but had a huge supply of naive investors.

Those investors, many of them entering financial markets for the very first time, heard there was money to be made on exciting new technologies.

But they didn't entirely understand those technologies, their implications, or how they would generate profits.

Then as now, this combination meant swindles and scams were constant.

That's why so much terminology for fraud and confidence games, language still widely used in

English today, comes to us through that early American setting.

The word grift itself comes from graft or corruption.

A shill, as crypto followers know all too well,

is a grifter's co-conspirator who pretends to be an unaffiliated fan

to create the illusion of public enthusiasm.

The final stage of a classic confidence or investment swindle is known as the blow-off.

The blow-off comes after a grifter has taken everything they think they can from their victim, also known as the mark.

Sometimes a blow-off is simple. The con artist simply disappears.

But often they'll try to cool off their mark.

That is, to diffuse, control, or redirect a victim's anger about getting scammed.

For instance, in a horse race-fixing scam, a 19th century con man might stage a horse's last second sickness.

Then, the fixer could keep the huge bet they talked the mark into placing on it and blame pure bad luck for the massive loss.

One goal of cooling off a mark is to reduce the chance that they'll pursue legal action against the con artist.

The creators of the TerraUSD stable coin had a lot of victims to cool off when their $60 billion structure collapsed to nearly zero within the space of a week.

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