Inside The Insidious World of Influencer Scams

2021 was the year wherein just about every social media influencer and celebrity crawled out of the proverbial woodwork to talk about, recommend, or launch their cryptocurrency.

Crypto is a form of digital currency, with the medium of exchange being digital and through a computer network. It is a currency that is not dependent on a central governing authority like banks or governments for it to exist and for you to use. Social media, as we know, is now teeming with influencers big and small, and many of them began to peddle and shill crypto to their millions of followers. It was a total recipe for financial disaster.

It began in early 2021 when a merry band of stock-market savvy Redditors raised a call to arms to stop Wall Steet from shorting GameStop (a popular video games retailer) stocks. Thousands of small-time and first-time investors bought Gamestop shares, driving the price up from $18 to almost $500.

Because of its success, people began to look for the next big "meme" stock. Elon Musk joined the fray, tweeting about Dogecoin, and it soon enjoyed a surge of 800%. And even though its success is a rare event or fluke, many of its early investors got rich, leading to a pandemic-like case of crypto mixed in with FOMO.

Many began to ask: What if there is another Doge on the horizon? And to try to answer the people, a veritable Pandora's Box of crypto flooded social media, all peddled by influencers. Seemingly overnight, everyone and his mother began to shill coins and cryptocurrency.

The cat lady from Netflix's Tiger King made her coin called "Cat Coin." Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather endorsed Ethereum Max, an Ethereum copycat, that had many of their fans losing money and suing them both for fraud. Ex wall street criminal Jordan Belfort (aka the Wolf of Wall Street himself) promoted MoonBoys crypto, currently trading at $0. These wealthy and privileged celebrities were technically jeopardizing the future financial security of their fans in exchange for lucrative payments to endorse these coins.

But it isn't all big-name stars. There is a whole slew of influencers, especially on platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, churning out content daily about how their young followers should go in and invest in many shady currencies.

These include Polydoge, Milf token, Dink Doink and the infamous "charity" Save the Children coin. Investigations revealed these coins to be worthless or just massive scams, which is why they needed influencers to help sell them.

The influencers will hype up the cryptocurrency, pumping the crowd into a buying frenzy, and when the buying starts, they turn around and dump their stocks, thereby flooding the market with the coin and sending prices crashing.

It's essential to take whatever influencers say with a ton of salt. They are either being paid to endorse these scammy currencies or, worse, are part of or are the scheme's masterminds.