Via Mashable, Logically has a report on just how easy it is to scam in the cryptocurrency industry – and why you need to be careful:
Logically’s detailed report follows just how these crypto scams played out on the Stellar blockchain. Stellar, a network like Bitcoin or Ethereum, allows anyone to create their own tokens in “5 easy steps.” The QAnon influencers would create scam tokens and then transfer their holdings out for real money or more establish cryptocurrency after telling their followers to invest. This is commonly known as a “rug pull” in the crypto space. The tokens were created under the domain name “Indus.Gold,” and the QAnon influencers would tell their followers that the crypto was backed by a real New York bank with a similar name. In fact, many of the scam cryptocurrencies followed a similar naming pattern in order to make them sound connected to an actual real company. Logically found that none of these tokens had any connections to the companies they were named after.
For example, Sungold token, which was pitched to their followers as being “backed by a Kazakh gold mine,” was supposedly “linked” to a Russian company of the same name. Logically could not find any information to back this claim up. This scam, however, netted the QAnon influencers approximately $2 million according to Logically.
But rather than focus on cryptocurrencies and what appears to be their inherent dangers, I’d like to shift focus – your’s and mine – to this term influencers. These are people that have found they can sway portions of their viewers’ judgments, and whether for good or ill is not unbalanced.
That is, that they can sway their audience’s judgment, or more to the point yours’, has little to no connection as to whether it’ll improve your life, or degrade it. I’d love to be able to say, This is the problem with social media, but quite honestly this sort of problem has existed from time immemorial. Human beings follow leaders, take their suggestions/orders, and imitate them as a survival behavior.
But leaders and influencers are not, by virtue of their position, uh, virtuous, now are they? That subspecies that is out for its own benefit and will rubbish the lot of you is known as grifters, scammers, scam artists, and a few other terms of approbation.
Social influencers, such as those mentioned in the above article, as well as other, more old-school influencers such as Gwyneth Paltrow, proprietor of Goop, or Jimmy Baker, former televangelist and, more recently, shiller of various fake meds, have surprisingly little to base their claim to being influencers to their names, or, as one famous, late author put it, They’re selling their jawbone, more or less. Paltrow works in the field of New Age products, while Bakker is from the older field of religious hucksterism. Neither field has produced much in the way of positive social influencers.
And, it appears, Internet-based social influencers, often hiding behind pseudonyms, have their share – and perhaps it’s a majority share – of influencers out to scam a buck, rather than give good advice.
I know that nearly everyone looks for that role model, that source of good advice about a world that can be puzzling and frustrating. My advice is to be careful. To examine thoughtfully such advice. To ping it with adversarial questions, even if only in your own mind. To find ways to peek behind the curtain, examine that advice’s construction.
And to do that with all the social influencers, on and off of the Internet.
