Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

Last year, the Federal Trade Commission reported that consumer losses to fraud had grown 30%.

The prior year reports of fraud had grown 16.3%. Apparently the biggest losses

were to investment scams including cryptocurrency schemes. Younger adults in their 20s reported

losing money more frequently than older adults. But when older adults did lose money, they lost a lot more. And that

makes sense as older adults tend to be wealthier, but hopefully a bit wiser. It's not just an issue

in the United States either. UK banks reported a large increase in fraud in 2022, with much of it originating online.

When I interviewed Zeke Fox a few weeks ago, he described how he had initially resisted

looking into crypto fraud as he felt that a journalist spending time investigating a crypto

scam was like a restaurant critic writing a review on a new tackle bell

that had just opened up. When he started investigating, he quickly realized that there was

so much fraud going on that he wouldn't have time to document it all. When I first spoke to

Coffeyzilla a few years ago, he told me at the time who he thought the biggest scammers out there were and wondered what he might do with his YouTube channel once he had finished exposing them.

Since that point, the scammers he has found have only gotten bigger and many are celebrities and don't even appear to make much of an effort

to disguise what they're up to anymore. Based on the latest fraud statistics, it doesn't

look like he'll be running out of work anytime soon. There's nothing new about scamming and

the way that most of today's scams function isn't really new either.

Most are simple Ponzi's and pyramid schemes, but has something changed in recent years

where with the growth of online hustle bros and celebrity involvement in many of these schemes,

people seem to possibly view it as being acceptable or even high status

to scam people. It's hard to go online without being pitched scam content about using

chat GPT to trade stocks or an endless variety of passive income schemes that are extremely

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