The bankruptcy of FTX, the main platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies, has placed a heavy burden on the attempt by companies in this sector to earn the trust of investors. The funds of more than a million users have flown out of their pockets. Not even three days had passed since this news when we found out that the European police have discovered a cryptocurrency scam of 2,000 million euros, which would affect 17,000 people from different countries on the continent and which has ended with numerous arrests in Albania. The organization had call centers in this Balkan country, but also in Bulgaria, Georgia, Macedonia and Ukraine, from where false brokers operated.
The world of cryptocurrencies does not raise its head. Sam Bankman-Fried, the young MIT Physics graduate who founded FTX, whom Fortune magazine called the new Warren Buffett, had an estimated fortune of $16 billion a week ago. He now he has nothing, beyond the Harry Potter books of his. But neither was an 80-year-old woman from Puigcerdà, who believed that a WhatsApp that she answered four years ago would allow her to make her savings profitable. Initially they asked her for 250 euros, which she quickly multiplied, in the end they ended up scamming half a million. And even 300,000 more, since the same heartless demanded it after presenting themselves as a law firm that fought for the interests of all those affected.
The world of cryptocurrencies has tried to value its solvency by even sponsoring soccer teams: among the companies investigated is one that sponsored Sevilla FC. But also athletes and influencers have participated in their ads, which were sometimes mere scams. There is therefore an impudence of people and entities in happily associating their name or their brand with unscrupulous people in exchange for money, forgetting that, as Stephen Vizinczey wrote in his novel An Innocent Millionaire, scammers are the worst kind of thieves because they despoil their victims. not only of their goods, but of faith in themselves.
