Crypto Boy: the film on Netflix about the Ponzi scheme involving cryptocurrencies

“Crypto Boy” is the name of a movie on Netflix that tells the story of Amir, a boy who fell into the scam of a Ponzi Scheme involving cryptocurrencies. 

Crypto Boy: the movie on Netflix that talks about the boy who fell into the scam involving cryptocurrencies

“Crypto Boy”, is the name of the film on Netflix released last October 2023, which tells the story of Amir, a boy who fell into a Ponzi Scheme scam involving cryptocurrencies. 

In the movie, Amir represents an ordinary boy who, like many others, having economic needs, got caught up in the mystery of cryptocurrencies, but ended up being sucked into a scam. 

And indeed, the plot of Crypto Boy sees Amir initially working in his father’s restaurant, but then he has to face very difficult economic times. Precisely for this reason, after attending a conference of a cryptocurrency investment company, the protagonist becomes so fascinated that he decides to participate. 

In practice, the manager of the company, Roy, would have promised easy earnings through trading and investments. Amir ends up 

Amir is so confident in the platform that involves cryptocurrencies, to the point of investing all his savings and involving friends and relatives in the pyramid scheme, thus achieving in a short time money and freedom never experienced before. 

And so it was, that then the Ponzi Scheme was revealed, just when the platform blocks money and withdrawals. Amir and all the other victims remain scammed, while Roy and the creators of the platform disappear from the radar. 

The movie on Netflix ends with Amir losing everything, learning the lesson, and reconciling with his father, returning to work for the restaurant. 

Crypto Boy: the film on Netflix about the Ponzi Scheme involving cryptocurrencies and the case of ICOs

The Ponzi Scheme described in Crypto Boy is a situation that has existed in the crypto world for a decade, even if in different forms. 

To make room for this type of scam has always been the great ignorance existing in the crypto sector, as well as the real price fluctuations that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have experienced over the years. 

To give a practical example, in 2017 there was the first bull run of Bitcoin, which saw the price of BTC rise above $17,000 in December, compared to $7,000 the previous month. 

Immediately in 2018, the technique of the Ponzi Scheme with a pyramid structure that recorded the highest number of scams in the crypto sector, involved the Initial Coin Offering (ICO). 

Already in an analysis from July 2018 stated that, out of 1450 ICOs analyzed, 271 were suspicious, estimating that the total capital invested in the fraudulent projects was around 1 billion dollars.

In practice, the projects that launched new tokens to raise funds for their developments often turned out to be simple PDFs or web pages, without a real company, team, whitepaper, and more behind them. 

What attracted the victim crypto-investors was therefore their ability to captivate them with promises of easy earnings, just like in the case of the movie Crypto Boy. Not only that, often and willingly, the earnings came more quickly by involving new affiliates and thus creating the scam with the pyramid structure. 

The trending cryptocurrency scam techniques

The Ponzi Scheme with a pyramid structure told on Netflix by the film Crypto Boy, joins a series of techniques that involve the most current cryptocurrencies. 

And indeed, compared to the early days of the crypto world, today, with its continuous expansion, the number of scams and crypto scams continues to increase as well. 

Precisely to avoid falling into the “magic of crypto,” which is created only to scam users with super attractive promises, it is necessary that users know which crypto scam techniques are trending. 

For example, at the beginning of January 2024, Eric Jardine, Cybercrime Research Lead at Chainalysis, described the technique of approval phishing which seems to be growing explosively in the crypto world.

Other studies, on the other hand, have created the ranking of the top 5 major crypto scams in 2023 for lost funds. In practice, the technique that caused the most lost funds is “access control”, followed by “rug pull”, “oracle issue”, “flash loan attach” and “phishing”.