https://www.europesays.com/1959605/ Elon Musk’s Estranged Daughter Labels Tesla A ‘Ponzi Scheme’ Citing Stock’s High P/E Ratio, Gets Called Out For ‘No Evidence’ #ElonMusk #HasanPiker #Musk #PonziScheme #TeslaInc #TeslaStock #VivianJennaWilson

'Trump is the con artist behind this giant Ponzi scheme. He lured voters into this fake MAGA project, pocketed some of the cash and rewarded his billionaire backers and friends (including Musk) with more, and will leave most Americans with a corrupt and decimated society.'

https://substack.com/home/post/p-158107666 #Trump #Musk #coup #PonziScheme #politics

"Donald Trump’s supporters have lost more than $12bn (£9.5bn) in a month after the value of the president’s cryptocurrency collapsed.

$Trump, a so-called “meme coin” unveiled on Jan 17, three days before Mr Trump’s inauguration, has lost more than 80pc of its value since its peak on Jan 19.

This has led to its overall worth falling from a peak of $15bn to $2.7bn on Thursday, as it suffered amid a wider crypto rout.
The paper value of the coins owned by Mr Trump himself has also fallen by $50bn.

While Mr Trump’s own losses have not been crystallised, investors are on the hook after spending heavily to back the Trump coin in the run-up to his inauguration, partly as a show of support but also as a gamble that the token would rise in value."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/27/trump-supporters-lose-12bn-as-presidents-crypto-boom-fades/

"En todas pasó lo mismo: un pequeño número de insiders se llevó el botín a casa y el resto perdió. Unos pocos ganaron cientos de millones con $TRUMP y $MELANIA. El resto perdió colectivamente 2.000 millones de dólares. Los promotores sacaron más de 100 millones de comisiones por transacción. La memecoin centroafricana llegó a valer 900 millones de dólares antes del colapso. Libra llegó a valer 4.400 millones. Poco después, Musk subió un 123% el valor de su memecoin favorita (DOGE) cambiando su foto de perfil por una sosteniendo la motosierra metálica roja que le regaló Milei.

Quizá solo son presidentes haciéndose ricos a costa de su electorado. Pero las cripto son el vehículo perfecto para financiar campañas y esquivar las regulaciones tradicionales de financiación. De hecho, son un medio popular entre los grupos supremacistas, nazis y antisemitas americanos. Solo en 2023, la Liga Antidifamación llegó a certificar al menos 15 grupos de extrema derecha moviendo importantes cantidades en criptomonedas para sus actividades. En noviembre de 2020, varios activistas ultras recibieron medio millón de dólares en bitcoin de un donante francés, poco antes del asalto al Capitolio. El FBI cree que se usaron para financiar la operación.

Es improbable que la nueva Administración norteamericana siga investigando esos usos."

https://elpais.com/opinion/2025-02-24/la-nueva-criptoeconomia-de-la-ultraderecha.html

Norway Indicts Four Men for Alleged $80,000,000 Crypto Racket That Defrauded Thousands, According to Authorities https://www.byteseu.com/762739/ #News #Norway #PonziScheme

Indian authorities seize nearly $190M in cryptocurrency tied to the BitConnect Ponzi scheme, marking one of the country's largest crypto enforcement actions. #India #CryptoNews #BitConnect #PonziScheme #Blockchain #CryptoEnforcement #DigitalAssets #Cryptocurrency

https://posivi.com/indian-authorities-seize-nearly-190m-in-cryptocurrency/

"MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It's not just that these people are desperate – it's that they only survive through networks of mutual aid. Poor women rely on other poor women to help with child care, marginalized people rely on one another for help with home maintenance, small loans, a place to crash after an eviction, or a place to park the RV you're living out of.

In other words, people who lack monetary capital must rely on social capital for survival. That's why MLMs target these people: an MLM is a system for destructively transforming social capital into monetary capital. MLMs exhort their members to mine their social relationships for "leads" and "customers" and to use the language of social solidarity ("women helping women") to wheedle, guilt, and arm-twist people from your mutual aid network into buying things they don't need and can't afford.

But it's worse, because what MLMs really sell is MLMs. The real purpose of an MLM sales call is to convince the "customer" to become an MLM salesperson, who owes you a share of every sale they make and is incentivized to buy stock they don't need (from you) in order to make quotas. And of course, their real job is to sign up other salespeople to work under them, and so on.

An MLM isn't just a pathogen, in other words – it's a contagion. When someone in your social support network gets the MLM disease, they don't just burn all their social ties with you and the people you rely on – they convince more people in your social group to do the same."

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/

"What they have built is a poorly regulated parallel financial system, where capital controls and banking and money-laundering laws can often be evaded. This system, populated by scammers, cyber-criminals, and jurisdiction-hopping crypto start-ups, is a minefield of balky security, frequent hacks, confusing protocols, and unreliable markets. But there’s profit to be made for those who know how to navigate it.

With its right-wing, libertarian underpinnings and its attempt to make issuing currency the province of private corporations, crypto-currency has always been about challenging the power and legitimacy of the nation-state. The attendant irony, though, is that crypto craves legitimacy and recognition from the powerful on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley and D.C.

The industry needs constant infusions of cash—what they call “fiat currency,” otherwise known as real money—because that is how the world still functions, and crypto is not viable on its own. Crypto has made deep inroads into the highest levels of institutional power, but, thankfully, the world doesn’t yet run on shitcoins."

https://airmail.news/issues/2025-2-1/the-view-from-here

"While the crypto world has been loudly all in for Trump, his memecoin stunt was a bridge too far for some. Crypto venture capitalist and enthusiastic Trump supporter Nic Carter, who was attending the ball when the token was launched, told Politico, “It’s absolutely preposterous that he would do this ... They’re plumbing new depths of idiocy with the memecoin launch.” He later told the AP, “Now, on the cusp of getting some liberalization of crypto regulations in this country, the main thing people are thinking about crypto is, ‘Oh, it’s just a casino for these meme coins’.” An influential crypto industry lawyer tweeted: “Trump dropping his own memecoin means he has the wrong people in his ear re crypto policy. I’m now getting very concerned about the Trump presidency.”6 Others expressed concern that the memecoin would make the whole industry look like a grift to outsiders who may be learning about it for the first time, and some joked that they missed former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s regulatory approach already.
(...)
In my view, the memecoin launch only adds to Trump’s long list of already very serious conflicts of interest. The two memecoins are in addition to multiple NFT projects by both Donald and Melania Trump, the World Liberty Financial project from which Trump earns a substantial percentage of the revenue, and Trump’s disclosed ETH holdings. There are also ethical issues around influence buying and the emoluments clause, and the president’s crypto tokens, NFT projects, and publicly disclosed wallet addresses are yet more avenues that those hoping to curry favor with the president could use to funnel money in his direction, as with his hotels and other business ventures during his first term in office."

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-75/

How much is the crypto stockpile worth today?

About 5¢ since The Big Hairy Dog did the rug pull.

How do you have a stockpile of something other people's transactions affect the value of? When it has no intrinsic value.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/jan/14/almost-10000-images-of-tennis-balls-plunge-up-to-90-in-value-as-australian-open-appears-to-ditch-nfts?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Nothin 'aint worth nothin.

"Montenegro has recently been able to reach its first “final verdict” that was actually final enough to see Kwon actually board a plane, and he arrived in the United States to appear in court on January 2. This was celebrated by Prime Minister Milojko Spajić, who tweeted that he believed the extradition would “put an end to pre-election manipulations and attempts to stage a scandal”. Kwon is probably not as happy about the outcome as Spajić. Although he fought both extradition to the United States and South Korea, he seemed particularly opposed to the idea of winding up in the United States, with his lawyers at one point arguing that Montenegrin courts had falsified information so as to suggest that the United States requested Kwon's extradition before South Korea, and stating that the facts “absolutely and one hundred percent give priority to Korea.” He’d tried again to halt this extradition, too, by again claiming that Minister of Justice Bojan Božović had illegally granted it, but to no avail.

The eight fraud, market manipulation, and money laundering charges carry hefty maximum sentences, and Kwon stands accused of causing $40 billion in losses to at least hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million people. He’s entered a not guilty plea, as is to be expected this early on, and is likely to do a whole lot more sitting around in a jail cell as prosecutors and defense attorneys sift through discovery. “Sounds like we’re going to be backing up a U-Haul to the Southern District,” District Judge Paul Engelmayer joked about the apparent six terabytes of data, before scheduling the trial start date a whopping year away in January 2026 (while offering Kwon and his defense team the opportunity to request an earlier trial)."

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-73/

"In the span of only a few days in November 2024, the FTX bankruptcy estate filed over thirty adversary cases.1 Several target political action committees and non-profits that received hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars from FTX as part of the company’s political influence campaigns and reputation polishing efforts. Others target other cryptocurrency exchanges where Alameda Research or affiliated entities were trading — sometimes secretly — and where account balances haven’t been released back to the bankruptcy estate. Some target FTX customers engaged in criminal behavior. And some target employees, contractors, or business associates of FTX and its entities."

https://www.citationneeded.news/not-just-one-bad-apple/

"Bitcoin and other crypto assets have long earned a reputation as a tool for tax evaders, but it seems that the US authorities have started to pay a bit more attention of late. After proposing a bespoke reporting form for digital assets earlier this year [I60], the IRS has now helped to prosecute its first criminal tax evasion case focused on crypto. A Texas man was sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to pay over $1 million in restitution for filing false tax returns that repeatedly dramatically understated how much he had made in gains on his bitcoin sales. In addition to lying to his accountant and claiming he had bought the bitcoins for a much higher price, he also tried to hide his bitcoin transactions using crypto mixers.15

Australia’s securities regulator, ASIC, has fined Kraken US$5.1 million for offering margin trading to Australian customers without first requiring them to undergo the process that would determine if that degree of risk was suitable for them. The more than 1,100 customers lost more than US$5 million. While some of the customers were likely sophisticated investors, Kraken made no effort to limit the product to such a group, and around 81% of the customers who used Kraken’s margin product lost money [W3IGG].

In a similar case, ASIC has filed suit against Binance’s Australian derivatives trading platform for allegedly misclassifying more than 500 retail investors as “wholesale investors” (similar to an accredited investor in the US). By designating them as more sophisticated investors, the customers were not given the legal rights and consumer protections granted to retail customers. These investors comprised 83% of Binance’s clients on the Australian platform."

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-72/