If you haven’t watched director Bryan Storkel’s bucket-of-ice-in-the-face documentary Bitconned on Netflix, never fear, there are no spoilers here.

This is a true story, first exposed by The New York Times’ tech journalist Nathaniel Popper, about three ruthless conmen with fake qualifications who set up a fake Miami-based crypto company, Centra Tech, and hoovered up a real $32-million from investors.

Raymond Trapani, Sam Sharma and Robert Farkas knew nothing about business, never mind finance, when they struck upon the idea to fulfil their American dream of getting rich, and quickly, by all means necessary.

Chugging American staples Xanax, alcohol, doobie and whatever else mind-altering was on offer, the three pulled off one of the most notorious frauds in the murky cryptocurrency financial frontier.

Copying and pasting photographs of fake CEOs and employees into a website, they launched their business, Centra Tech, which took off like a rocket in Elon Musk’s wildest dreams.

“It was too easy,” says Trapani at some point in the film, flashing a chemically whitened smile. Trapani is proud to admit he was “born to be a criminal”, just like his father.

A sociopath who would do anything for money, and with few prospects for work in the real world, Trapani and his fellow crypto burglars even convinced former boxer Floyd Mayweather to endorse the scam.

Theirs was an idea so simple and suspect it should have instantly rung alarm bells, set off flares and inflated the dinghies – a debit card you could use to spend your cryptocurrency in “real time”. In other words, withdrawing good old cash from ATMs. Relax, even Visa was apparently on board, only it wasn’t.

In 2017, Centra Tech launched an initial coin offering – a way of fundraising through selling custom virtual currencies. The money poured in as frenzied investors scouring the ether for cryptocurrency bargains fell for the ruse. They lost it all. Lives were ruined.

It is greed that inspired the likes of Ray Trapani, Bernie Madoff and countless other grifters. (Illustration: Midjourney AI)

1980s ‘greed is good’ on steroids

An audience review of Bitconned by viewer Dan Cook hits it all out of the ballpark.

Says my new best friend Dan, “… director Storkel paints a depressing picture of unfathomable capitalist greed and wealth-inspired entitlement – the dark side of the fabled American dream.

“At its black heart is the vile person of Ray Trapani, Centra Tech’s odious co-founder who, in true Dinsdale Piranha fashion, really deserves to have his head nailed to the floor.

“Genuinely, not since Piers Morgan have I wanted to open-palm slap someone across the eyes.”

And so say all of us.

People, this is the age of grifters, cheats, liars, vape oil salesmen and bleached-toothed political conmen. They are all around us.

There never was and never will be a way of making “easy” money without ending up either in the slammer or in the gutter or bankrupt (or maybe the president of a country).

Law enforcement agencies the world over (perhaps not so much in South Africa) spend loads of time and resources trying to recover ordinary silly people’s money from individuals who feel perfectly entitled to steal it. Raak wys (wise up).

Money, money, money

In 1922, one of Portugal’s greatest writers, Fernando Pessoa, penned a novella titled The Anarchist Banker.

It is a political dialogue between two old friends, the banker and an unnamed second person whom he tries to convince that his youth spent as a working-­class anarchist is not over now that he is a wealthy banker.

To the banker, everything is a fiction: Politics, religion, culture and money.

After a life dedicated to self-sacrifice and struggle, the banker says: “I set to work to subjugate the fiction of money by growing rich.”

He adds: “I worked, I struggled, I earned money. I worked harder, I struggled harder, I earned more money. In the end, I earned a lot of money. I must confess, my friend, that I did not worry about the means; I used whatever means I could – sequestration, financial sophistry, unfair competition. So what?”

That could be US presidential hopeful Donald Trump or Ray Trapani speaking.

“Was I supposed to worry about means when I was combating social fictions which were both immoral and unnatural?

“I was working for freedom and I had to use what weapons I could to combat tyranny,” he insists.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Are terrorists really being funded by crypto?

In 1929, seven years after Pessoa wrote The Anarchist Banker, the world was plunged into a depression with the collapse of the US stock market.

Like the crypto addicts who fell for Centra Tech and the promise of quick moolah, before the 1929 crash, the stock market was viewed as an easy way to make money. Millions paid the price and lost it all. Starvation and mass unemployment followed.

Roll on 2008 and it happened all over again. Socialism for the banks, capitalism for the people as the US and other governments bailed out big banks. We have still not recovered.

It is greed that inspired the likes of Trapani, Bernie Madoff and countless other grifters. And it was also greed that drove investors to throw good money after a fiction. You have only yourself to blame. Go watch the film. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R29.