Folks, It’s Just Showbiz
Well maybe you feel differently if you were one of the recipients of the FTX scam. But as Kara Kennedy reminds readers in Spectator, last year’s Super Bowl football fans dubbed it the Crypto Bowl after eToro, Coinbase, Crypto.com, and FTX all paid for airtime.
Fast forward 12 months to yesterday’s big game, not only was Tom Brady not to be found, but Mark Evans, the executive vice president of ad sales for Fox Sports, told the Associated Press following the disastrous downfall of FTX, there would be “zero representation in that category on the day at all.”
Well, nice that Brady will have a comfortable retirement, but not so lucky for anyone who took his investment advice, continues Ms. Kennedy. Retirement might be a long time coming for those beguiled fans.
The seven-time Super Bowl champion is currently named in a class action lawsuit that claims he and his now-ex Gisele Bundchen lured fans into a massive fraud. Brady jumped on the Sam Bankman-Fried hype in 2022, making silly ads for his crypto firm, posting pics with the weirdo founder and even taking equity. Then it turned out that FTX was, shall we say, not quite the asset that Brady led us all to believe.
Who Could NOT Believe Tom
For example, one fan involved in the lawsuit claims he invested his savings because of the star. “As a New England Patriots fan my entire life, you can imagine the influence that Tom Brady would have.” Who can blame him?
Celebrity and fraud are a match made in heaven. In a con, the victim has to buy into the crime. It’s a question of confidence, a stiff white collar, and a smile. Look at Larry David, advises Kara Kennedy. Larry’s the closest thing the U.S. has to “comedy royalty.”
(Larry David) … joined Brady by flogging crypto at halftime during the last Super Bowl. “Don’t miss out!” he teased, just a few months before backers missed out on $30 billion of investment when the dodgy outfit went under.
Sadly for Larry, he’s also named in the suit. The paperwork claims that FTX was “truly a house of cards.” But you can’t have a house of cards without a few royal flushes. And it isn’t just normal Americans that get taken in by the promise of easy money: it’s our celebrities too.
“If it seems too good to be true, it normally is,” Harry Horsfall, the CEO of web3-powered marketing firm Zebu Digital, told Kennedy.
“Some of the world’s top hedge funds, with years of industry experience, did two rounds of due diligence on FTX and were fooled by SBF, so while the space is still unregulated, extreme caution is advised.”
Too Good to Be True
Talking about Bernie Madoff … “There’s obvious life lessons there,” sadly reminisced poor ol’ Kevin Bacon, “if something is too good to be true, it’s too good to be true,” the aging actor now counsels.
Kevin Not Alone
Steven Spielberg, John Malkovich and Larry King also took a serious hit from Madoff, who died in prison after being sentenced to 150 years behind bars.
An Eponymous Scheme
Charles Ponzi, “popularizer of the eponymous scheme,” granted one final interview.
Over just seven months in 1920, he was able to con 30,000 investors by telling them he could double their investments in just ninety days. He told the reporter:
“Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought, I had given them the best show that was ever staged since the landing of the Pilgrims. It was easily worth the fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over.”
And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the finale. It’s all just showbiz.
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