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[00:00:00] Lee Michael Murphy: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome into the Free Retiree Show. Today we’ve got an interesting topic for you. We’re talking all about crypto, talking about best case uses for crypto web 3.0,

[00:00:11] Lee Michael Murphy: if you’ve, turned on the news, you can see the crypto market is not doing so well, and it’s all over the news. And we’re gonna talk about how to avoid getting scam. In crypto, but also this will translate to all your other finances. It’s really important information, how to not get your hard earned money stolen.

[00:00:29] Lee Michael Murphy: I’m your host, Wealth Manage Lean Michael Murphy Al Sergio Patterson.

[00:00:34] Sergio Patterson \: What is up everyone? How are you doing?

that voice, Sergio Are you coming with the deep, sexy voice today?

[00:00:39] Sergio Patterson \: On Fridays I bring out the deep,

[00:00:40] Lee Michael Murphy: sexy voice? I can tell you, you sound like you should be. At a late night DJ station, just talking about love songs.

[00:00:47] Sergio Patterson \: Now my, my 10 year old got me sick and I’m feeling it right now, but,I’m excited though. I love the

[00:00:52] Lee Michael Murphy: voice though.

[00:00:53] Lee Michael Murphy: Maybe you should keep it. It’s good for the podcast. for today’s guest, we have Erica Stanford. She’s a best selling author, frequent [00:01:00] commentator, international speaker guest lecture at Warwick Business. She talks all about crypto and digital currency. She’s kind of the go-to in this area, for crypto safety, all crypto things.

[00:01:11] Lee Michael Murphy: She is the founder of the Crypto Curry Club, the UK’s leading community and number one rated network in educational vets for crypto FinTech blockchain. She’s the editor of the Crypto Curry Club and Sege. You spotted Erica online and you’re like, We have to have her. This girl is a wealth of know. So what stands out to you about Erica?

[00:01:32] Sergio Patterson \: story, The story was she’s actually a part of the LinkedIn, creator accelerator program. And that’s kind of where I found her. But what stood out was, I think I’m afraid to put money into crypto sometimes. I think there’s so many scams, people are losing their money.

[00:01:43] Sergio Patterson \: We’ve talked about this a long time, and part of our show is we wanna filter out the bs. So what stood out to me was Erica, was it seemed like what she was saying was true, and she didn’t worry about. Who’s watching or who’s listening. It was just like, this is what’s really happening in this space, and we need to hear this.

[00:01:59] Sergio Patterson \: I just, I think there’s too [00:02:00] many scams all around.

[00:02:02] Lee Michael Murphy: Absolutely. She’s also the author of Crypto Wars, Fake Deaths, Missing Billions, and Industry Disruption. So without further due, Erica, good morning. good evening from where you’re coming from. But thank you for joining us today.

[00:02:16] Lee Michael Murphy: How are you?

[00:02:17] Erica Stanford: No, thank you for having me. yeah, really grateful to be here and, thanks to Sergio for bringing on the extra sexy voice

[00:02:22] Lee Michael Murphy: I know he just brought this on for you, man. Way to bust out the big gun, Sergio.

I take one for the team. Gotta do what I gotta do. .

[00:02:31] Lee Michael Murphy: But, tell us about what you do.

[00:02:33] Lee Michael Murphy: I give the listeners a little bit of a rundown. your book seems to be doing really well. You seem to be one of the trusted resources in the crypto area, and it’s tough to find those, but once you give the listeners a rundown of what you’re

[00:02:45] Erica Stanford: doing, Yeah, sure. Neil, thanks for having me on. So the book was lockdown, so that started out, a publisher reached out, asked if I wanted to do a book about crypto hacks and scams, and I.

[00:02:59] Erica Stanford: [00:03:00] Naively thought writing a book can’t be so hard and can’t take so long and would be a fun project to do. And I was totally, utterly wrong. it takes a year, it takes over your life. it’s a lot of sweat and tears and, thank God for lockdown. It made it possible. but I ran in the UK a sort of crypto networking community, at least until lockdown.

[00:03:17] Erica Stanford: We had a load of in person, events in Bicon. where we brought together the people running crypto companies and FinTech companies and doing a lot of cool stuff in the space. What’s been really cool about that is since we started doing the events, it was nothing big, nothing crazy, just get a restaurant, people pay their way, but just inviting sort of the main people and being really selective on who we had and having a really sort of closed kni.

[00:03:46] Erica Stanford: Invite only group with sort of Chatham House rules for conversation, and doing these events every week. You’re in a room of the people who were years ago, years before lockdown involved in this space, really early on, and a lot of these people were either [00:04:00] working at companies or were founding startups.

[00:04:02] Erica Stanford: And some of those were two guys in a room. And those two guys are. two guys running a massive $40 billion company, with a load of employees. So from doing those events early on, it was just the most fantastic way, totally sort of by luck as it were of getting to know a lot of people in the community, making friends with a lot of people running the companies and now just being friends with a lot of really cool people who do a lot of really cool stuff in the space.

[00:04:29] Erica Stanford: I, I think what’s in a nice position to be in is just hearing a lot of the news and stuff about crypto, but through friends over WhatsApp or through friends over at coffee and sort of hearing a more personal take on things. So that’s been super cool. So run networking events and do them on an invite only basis is probably my best tip for meeting people and getting industry knowledge.

and then the. Came out of that there, there was a, I dunno if you’ve heard it, a BBC in the uk, a podcast series called The Missing Crypto Queen, [00:05:00] and it was a guy, Jamie Butler, who was paid by the bbc. So that’s like the UK’s main sort of new service, to do this whole piece of investigative journalism.

[00:05:08] Erica Stanford: And there’s this massive Ponzi scheme. Called One Coin and it wasn’t even a cryptocurrency. It said it was a cryptocurrency. It wasn’t even a cryptocurrency. It was just a total scam, just total sort of selling thin air. But it’s thought that this scam has taken it up to 25 billion. It’s still not known quite how much money.

[00:05:31] Erica Stanford: People have lost. And it’s, this massive Ponzi scheme and the fbi, so the American FBI got onto this in 2017 and, issued a notice that, this is a scam. Stay away. and they, there’s been man hunts for the founder and the ring leaders ever since. and since 2017, they’ve arrested a bunch of the people involved.

[00:05:50] Erica Stanford: The main woman who ran it is. Awol. nobody really knows where she is. No one’s been able to find her. Turns out she was having an affair with her [00:06:00] money LA who had been sort of had gone into some sort of plea agreement with the FBI whereby he gave her information about her. She’d hired a spy to.

[00:06:10] Erica Stanford: Basically buy the flat Beneath has in Miami and drill a hole between the two so she can listen into his conversations with why we

[00:06:18] Lee Michael Murphy: need a Netflix series. . Yeah.

[00:06:20] Sergio Patterson \: I wanna watch the show.

[00:06:21] Erica Stanford: I believe they’re doing one, rumor I heard is Kate Winslet starring, but that’s rumors.

but she basically hired this guy. Overhears conversations with his wife to find out is he gonna be leaving the wife. But in the end, she heard that the FBI are looking for her, so she’s been on the run ever since. So you’ve got this massive, crazy sort of Ponzi scheme. Loads of people lost loads of money.

[00:06:43] Erica Stanford: Everybody know that it’s been a scam since 2017, except that. It’s still going. And I put into LinkedIn like one coin. There’s still 1100 people that I can see on LinkedIn. And you can only see of connections. of connections. I can see 1100 people that are [00:07:00] still promoting this scam, and that’s just on LinkedIn.

[00:07:03] Erica Stanford: There’s still events happening. So there’s this crazy podcast series about this, how this scam got so big and how people fall through it. And, all the marketing, the manipulation, the tactics used. I invited the guy who did speak one of my events, he was amazing and sort of Chatham out rules.

[00:07:21] Erica Stanford: And then from that a bunch of people came forward and told me their own stories of. Basically seeing early scams and even going to the authorities or posting on social media that, hey, this is a scam. They got D threat. One guy is under like government protection in the country where he is based if in case a load of people enter the country because he was a whistleblower to a scam.

[00:07:43] Erica Stanford: And all these people invited me into these sort of, Chat rooms and forums on social media run by scams or run by people that have fallen for the scams and just basically watch how they go on, how they con people, the marketing that they use and so that’s sort of how I got into doing. [00:08:00] So you got to be see the dark side of crypto firsthand.

[00:08:03] Erica Stanford: Yeah. And it’s crazy and it’s scary how good at marketing they are. It’s scary how manipulative they are. It’s scary how good the sales people are and also how good the. Look like it’s easy to see from a normal person why you think this is okay. and then other than that, I work at a law firm, so it’s called cms.

[00:08:23] Erica Stanford: I believe, the biggest law firm in Europe. They’ve got a really big, the biggest crypto team in the uk. So they’ve got a whole team of crypto and FinTech specialists who do sort of, for the law, for everything crypto. So through that it’s super cool. We get hundreds of companies coming in and you just gotta meet all these people from big companies to banks to tiny little guy, two guys with idea in a bedroom and everything in between.

[00:08:46] Erica Stanford: It’s

[00:08:46] Lee Michael Murphy: really

[00:08:46] Sergio Patterson \: interesting. if I’m interested in buying crypto, what are some of the top five flags? Like red flags,

[00:08:51] Erica Stanford: the problem and the sad thing in crypto is it’s a really cool technology that,in theory allows economic freedom and potential to be able to do things like [00:09:00] get banked if you don’t have access to a bank account.

it’s a really cool technology that in theory does all this cool stuff and then there’s so much market manipulation and scams and it’s, you’ve gotta be. Super, super, super careful. top five red flags is firstly, something like 20 something thousand cryptocurrencies at the moment, of which, you know, a handful, are, good, worthwhile, useful.

have purpose slightly more than a handful, but you know, it’s not 20,000. and a lot of the cryptocurrencies, you’ve really gotta look at, do they actually have a use case? is there anything behind it other than a piss take or hype or just, a bubble. So I, I think for.

[00:09:41] Erica Stanford: Firstly, you’ve gotta really look at is this something, is there a real use case? Is there something behind this other than thin air? secondly, a lot of the scams will tend to do, things like, Offers that are too good to be true, so that they might say, send us. [00:10:00] But what they’ll do is they’ll do anything to get you to buy Bitcoin or to buy crypto and to send it to them.

and it will be under different guys, but it will be all along the lines of, Hey, we’ve got this amazing new trading algorithm. Send us your Bitcoin and we’ll guarantee that you’ll get X percent, really high returns. Now, take a step back, be realistic. If there’s such an amazing trading algorithm, why would you share it?

[00:10:23] Erica Stanford: You need to keep it like you do that for yourself. You wouldn’t want anyone to know. And if banks and hedge funds that have loads of money and employ the best people in the world, if they can’t guarantee that kind of return. take a step back or they’ll say, Oh, we’ve got this really secure exchange.

we’ll store your crypto or security, or, we’ll, we’ll enable you to buy something more cheaply. Or, We’ve got this new cryptocurrency. Send us your Bitcoin and we’ll send us you. We’ll send you these magical coins and we’ll give you more of these coins. And they’re gonna double and they’re gonna multiply.

[00:10:51] Erica Stanford: So you’ll get more of these and they’re gonna go up and value,or some are just, they call themselves Bitcoin doubles as the simplest of all. Send us your Bitcoin and in 24 or 48 [00:11:00] hours, we’ll send you back double. all of these employees are to get you to send in. For your money.

if anyone’s getting you to sending Bitcoin, basically just don’t, because in, so many cases as a scam, and now that they’re more sophisticated, you’ve got like scam schools in, various countries around the world where, and in some cases people literally pay tuition fees and, you turn up at nine in the morning and you sit in a classroom and they learn how to put on different accents.

[00:11:27] Erica Stanford: They learn how to write 20 year old girl, like a 50 year old guy, they learn how to communicate and they go on dating apps and social media apps and then, speak to people and speak to enough people to find the vulnerable people and then spend months like cult cultivating a relationship.

[00:11:42] Erica Stanford: So people think, Hey, I’ve fall in love with this person and this is great. and then they build this whole story, which all leads to, hey, I found this amazing investment. and this is for our future. You’re gonna get rich for our future. Buy Bitcoin and send. Just don’t send Bitcoin is probably the biggest.

[00:11:59] Lee Michael Murphy: more of the [00:12:00] story. Don’t send too good to be true.

[00:12:01] Sergio Patterson \: Lee’s a financial advisor and if he came to me tomorrow and said, I’m gonna double your investment or triple or quadruple, I’m like, No, you’re not. stop. Yeah, there’s people in your industry that over promise and it’s no, that’s not realistic.

[00:12:15] Lee Michael Murphy: Absolutely. I’ve seen a few, people that I know and clients that started dabbling in crypto and they always get led in by the, you’re gonna get this crazy amount of re return. So a lot of times it’s these random exchanges. They look professional. The websites look very nice. You wouldn’t be able to tell that it’s a Sham website, but they say, You put your money here, you’re just gonna get 15%, Yeah. No, no questions asked. You just, you put your money here, we give you 15%. Now that number. that’s a pretty solid number. that just for keeping your money there, about 15,

more than 15 times higher, what you’d get in Anya, right?

[00:12:49] Lee Michael Murphy: Yeah, exactly. And then, what they do is they put their money there, they can pull the money out, and so you still see your money growing and then all of a sudden it stops, they, yeah.

[00:12:58] Lee Michael Murphy: They lock it up [00:13:00] and you’re, you’re stuck basically. If it sounds too good to be true, It probably is.

[00:13:05] Erica Stanford: It is. and you’ve touched on a point, like crypto exchanges are one of the biggest problems and the biggest sort of risks in the space. A because like you say, you’ve got crypto exchanges and then you’ve also got duplicate crypto exchanges where scams will basically copy the side of one and make it look identical, that they’ll make it look so real and there’ll be, youone thing off the letter, but basically people will be directed there and it via Phish or something.

and you’ve got all these sort of scam, duplicate, fraudulent crypto exchanges that actually aren’t, they’re just scams to taking your money just by you clicking on the wrong link. But then, we’ve seen it blow up just in the last couple days. One of the problems with crypto exchanges, you’ve got two.

[00:13:45] Erica Stanford: Main ways of storing crypto. And there’s one, some big famous saying, Crypto not your key is not your coin. So what that means is in crypto you’ve got a thing where you get private keys, which is like a password. It’s like a key to access your crypto. And you’ve got ways of storing [00:14:00] crypto where only you can access your crypto.

[00:14:04] Erica Stanford: It’s like in your own sort of little sort of bank vault safe where you have a key and you can access that crypto and then only you can access it. So even. the, sort of the foundations of the exchange disappear, that doesn’t matter cause you’ve got the keys to your crypto and you’re responsible.

there’s been horror stories around that. People lose their keys and then, lose their crypto or they forgot what it their private key was and then they’ve lost their crypto and there’s been cases around that. But in that context, you are responsible for your crypto. So even if there is, a problem, you can still access your crypto.

[00:14:36] Erica Stanford: But then what most people. Do. You’ve got the sort of the centralized model where people go, Hey, I don’t wanna be responsible for my keys. That’s too much responsibility in case I forget them, or they don’t know, or they get led by good marketing. So you’ve got all of these centralized exchanges where people will buy, put money in, send Crypto into the exchange and leave it there.

[00:14:56] Erica Stanford: And instead of people having their own sort of like bank thoughts with their own [00:15:00] crypto, it’s all sort of intermingled in one pot. Now, in an ideal world, the exchange would go, Hey, we’ve got whatever it is, a hundred Bitcoin deposited by a hundred people here. We’ll just leave that hair and protect it and it’ll be safe.

[00:15:14] Erica Stanford: And there are some that do that and have really secure custody. And then there’s other ones like what we’ve just seen with this whole fallout of the FTX exchange where they don’t do that and they take people’s crypto deposits and. Do stuff which results in people no longer being able to access their deposits.

and then you are relying on, the honesty and the goodness of those exchanges, which has several times proven, really risky and meant that a lot of people lost a lot of money.

[00:15:45] Sergio Patterson \: This is probably a good segue, can you talk to us a little bit about what’s going on in, in the news with finance and ftx

[00:15:52] Sergio Patterson \: It seems yeah. Major things

[00:15:54] Lee Michael Murphy: are happening.

it does, and it’s, it is one of those, I don’t wanna go too deep into it because it’s, it is [00:16:00] just kicking off bunch of people that have lost money, but it’s, we’re finding out stuff pretty much every minute, every time I refresh a newsfeed, there’s.

[00:16:07] Erica Stanford: Stuff comes out. But in short, it was a big exchange. they had their own token and the sort of, the bigger part of the company owned by the same guy had made a bunch of investments. But the, I think that the big part of the problem here, you had a fund and it was revealed that, actually the, assets versus, Versus liabilities wasn’t quite as, as good as what either, what they believed it to be or what they’d made out to be, by quite a long way.

[00:16:33] Erica Stanford: And also that half of their assets were their own token, which is, crypto token. Some have value, some are printed out of Anette. So that was a risk. You’ve got a fund with, far less assets than you think. Far more liabilities than you think. And half of these assets are basically its own token printed out Infin Air.

[00:16:50] Erica Stanford: So that’s, Ideal in a market sense, but then the bigger part of the problem, which is affecting more individuals and many companies, you have this [00:17:00] exchange and FTX was sort of, it was seen as like the golden. Boy or the golden, child of crypto, that the founder, had been really coating up with regulators and then trying to sort of act all golden and, had a really good interface.

[00:17:14] Erica Stanford: People liked it. People used us as a place to store their crypto or to exchange. And even a lot of companies and a lot of funds, Stored their money on this exchange, on this platform because they trusted it, because they trusted the people behind it. Cause they trusted their relationship with the regulators.

[00:17:30] Erica Stanford: So what happened there? at least how it appears is a lot of people and a lot of companies trusted this FTX platform, the exchange with their money and kept a lot of their crypto on it. And, In an ideal scenario, if people deposited crypto on it, the same amount of crypto as it’s been deposited would still be there available for people to take out any time.

[00:17:56] Erica Stanford: But what it appears to be, and I don’t [00:18:00] want to speculate, but what it appears to be from news coming out is that the exchange wasn’t just leaving the people’s crypto. There, but was somehow using them or using that money to make loans, which turned out bad or was somehow doing something that wasn’t entirely good with that.

[00:18:17] Erica Stanford: So that, what happened is when the news came out about the fund, which is all part of the same, parent company and same founding team, that they had less assets than people thought, and that the token, Had less value than people thought. That started crashing down, and it was like a bank run happened on this exchange where people wanted to withdraw their crypto because they were suddenly worried that not all is safe.

[00:18:39] Erica Stanford: And then they froze withdrawals because,it seems that they don’t have the money. there that they’d taken in people’s crypto, said they’re gonna store it and then done something with that crypto so that people could no, would longer withdraw their money. and now it’s just filed for bankruptcy, in the last hour or so.

so it seems that a lot of people and companies who trusted a [00:19:00] lot of money, we were talking multiple billions, of crypto onto this platform that’s now been wiped out and it isn’t clay yet. Where that crypto disappeared to. it’s looking like a lot of the investments made were somehow intermingled, perhaps fraudulently from the loans or the crypto deposits that people put in.

[00:19:22] Erica Stanford: But that’s gonna come out in the news.

[00:19:27] Lee Michael Murphy: Yeah. It’s wild. You think about,the athletes that are behind, something like ftx, like Tom Brady. Steph Curry, I mean there’s pretty big names. yeah.

and that’s one of the problems in the space, right? Iit’s not that this is unique to crypto, but crypto is highly volatile.

[00:19:43] Erica Stanford: It’s super manipulated. there’s billionaires can manipulate the price of cryptocurrency by 30% with one tweet. we don’t need to. any names or any car brand owners who would do that. but it’s super volatile. It’s super risky, at the best of times.

[00:19:56] Erica Stanford: And then you’ve got it, you’ve got influences [00:20:00] who take money, maybe with good intentions to promote these cryptocurrencies. So people go, I trust this person and then that, But it’s, you’ve got, like you say, celebrities and influencers paid to promote crypto. But I’d say even the bigger problem is, that’s in the public eye.

Kim Kardashian just got a fine and a bit of a slap on the rest for promoting what turned out to be a total scam. and then you’ve also got on social media and particularly TikTok, a lot of these influences who just, promote without any regard. different projects and, the people AMAs like millions of followers and, pose as financial experts or financial advisors or experts in whatever and, get loads of followers and then promote a crypto exchange or a crypto project or whatever, and people believe it.

and I think one of the biggest things in crypto is basically don’t trust anybody at all under any circumstances. And we keep seeing that over and over again. Even people. have coed up with regulators and seemed respectable, have been proven to [00:21:00] not be trustworthy. So don’t trust anybody at all.

really?

[00:21:05] Lee Michael Murphy: Unless it don send, don’t send Bitcoin, right? Dad? Don’t trust anybody. That’s the takeaway. Don’t trust anyone. it’s, man, it’s a tough space to be in. but right now, where do you see these For the ftx, the people that had money on the exchange? Are they gonna be okay or is it, if they just bought the FTX token

so I think, so people who held the FTX token, that the token has gone down a lot in value. the latest statistic I saw was about 90%. drop, but you know, that’s fluctuating like in, in anything in crypto. So people that bought the token, if they bought it at its high and sold it at its low or have lost.

[00:21:43] Erica Stanford: Suck a 90%, possible that it might go up. Doubtful. Very doubtful. So yeah, people in that bought the token and have sold will have, lost the percentage that it’s gone down by, people on the exchange that who held crypto there. that’s. I feel very bad for a lot of them.

[00:21:59] Erica Stanford: It’s [00:22:00] not just people, it’s companies. Like some large companies had millions or tens or hundreds of millions that they’d stored on this platform because they fought it to be safe. and at the moment it’s not known. I know some very worried people. Right now who have money on that, and they don’t know what will happen.

[00:22:16] Erica Stanford: So the latest is they filed for bankruptcy and there’s now lawyers and a team who will go through what assets they have, what they have, and then that will be divided out with people who should be able to reclaim something. At the moment, it doesn’t seem to be known if or what. Money is left there.

so I imagine a lot of people will be banned.

[00:22:39] Lee Michael Murphy: I don’t

[00:22:39] Sergio Patterson \: want this to sound wrong, but if you’re a big bank or a big company, you have hundreds of millions of dollars. Is that responsible to put that kind of money on a exchange? Like in my opinion? no.

no.

[00:22:51] Sergio Patterson \: Like financially responsible.

[00:22:52] Erica Stanford: The answer is no. I think that the problem with Fdx is why a lot of people kept money there. Two reasons, [00:23:00] Eva, because, so the founder has always been the one, Sam has always been the one to co up with regulators to say, get regulated.

[00:23:07] Erica Stanford: He was seen as this golden boy and was always, working with regulators and posing that angle Trusted him. And trusted that exchange as being safe because of that image of working with regulators, whereas others have been more sort of anti-establishment, in So that, that’s been a problem of misplaced trust.

[00:23:28] Erica Stanford: And the other thing is because those who wanted to trade crypto was an easy platform to do so they wanted to have the money there. On hand to make the trades because if you store crypto more safely, there are ways of storing crypto more safely, which is basically like offline, where you have your own is like a cold storage thing.

[00:23:48] Erica Stanford: And there are institutional grade, security custody platforms that are seen as your crypto is safer. it’s, as safe or maybe safer than money in a bank. There’s no way anyone [00:24:00] can hack it and that. Institutional grade security. But the sort of, the caveat with that is that crypto is safe there, but then if you wanted to do trades, you have to get it out from there, which is an instance.

[00:24:11] Erica Stanford: So why platforms might have kept crypto on the exchange is because, so that they can, that they can trade. And have access to that. The sad thing with FTX is it wasn’t necessarily people being lazy. and thinking, Oh, this is easier as people having misplaced trust and a lot of people have that trust in the founders and in the platform, would it be safer in a bank?

[00:24:33] Erica Stanford: Probably, Yeah. I think what crypto people would say is that banks don’t tend to pay a very high interest, and there have been. Problems with banks. I certainly know people who have gone to a bank at certain times over my lifetime and not been able to withdraw cash.

there have been bank runs, banks have disinvested, people have lost money. It’s only in short up to certain amount. are you guaranteed safe if you keep [00:25:00] money in a bank while not above a certain amount? And not always. And a lot of people have been affected and a lot of countries around the world.

[00:25:07] Erica Stanford: Have learned that you can’t trust banks. I lived in Argentina for a while and the first lesson there was, whatever you don’t go to a bank. it’s not safe. so you know, there are. Countries and people around the world who leaving money at a bank is a viable option or where it’s not seen as safe.

[00:25:23] Erica Stanford: And then there’s also a belief that, banks still control your money and, traditional financial systems like PayPal, just really to think, oh, if you basically do a political tweet that we don’t like, we’ll find you $2,500 and then retract that. That is crazy. but you know, there’s a lot of distrust in the traditional system and part of what crypto is, A belief in financial freedom.

and the problem is then it’s, you go back to trusting individuals who misappropriate your funds.

[00:25:53] Sergio Patterson \: That’s a really good point. That all makes sense. And I think with crypto it’s like they, put the trust in the founders [00:26:00] and I think what’s great about crypto is like you don’t have to put trust in a human.

[00:26:03] Sergio Patterson \: I thought. I think

[00:26:04] Lee Michael Murphy: that’s what I. Exactly,

and there are ways where you don’t have to trust people in crypto, which are safer. the only trouble is crypto’s super new, like super new, Bitcoin came out 2009. The technology’s evolving super fast, like the custody platforms have evolved super fast.

[00:26:24] Erica Stanford: Everything is evolving super fast. The user experience. Hasn’t evolved, I would argue, as well as it hunt maybe could have done. And there’s been more focus in some cases on security, on platforms. So it’s not as easy or as instant if you want to keep your own crypto as securely as it’s possible yet.

[00:26:51] Lee Michael Murphy: As someone that, you’ve done a lot of work in this space. You’ve got to, and you’ve got to work and not work with, but you’ve got to see the scammers and the dark [00:27:00] web and all the bad that’s in this space. After seeing all this in, knowing what you know about crypto, do you feel that crypto is something that you would stay away from, or do you feel like there’s a future?

[00:27:15] Lee Michael Murphy: No,

I’m a hundred percent still excited by the space. I think, there’s a lot of things one should stay away from, which is, checking and being super careful. So there’s a lot of bad things in this space. Everyone has to. Stay away from and be really careful.

[00:27:28] Erica Stanford: But you know, at its core, what I find sad about it is people get excited by, Oh, price of Bitcoin is this, or price of whatever, is that at its core, you’ve got a technology that allows payments between two people. Without needing a bank account, without needing to trust anybody, without needing that whole traditional sale.

you know what it enables is really exciting and really cool with sort of traditional fiat currency. You can’t send less than a certain amount for it to be economically viable. if I wanted to send you. [00:28:00] Or 1 cent or something digitally. What is gonna cost a little more than that then for me to make that transaction to you is not economically viable.

[00:28:08] Erica Stanford: If you want to send me a dollar digitally, for example, because of the costs of the sort of third party companies. So what crypto opens up, at its core, it doesn’t need to be about the volatile tokens or about all of that. You can have some stable. Assets or asset back things that you could send for micro amounts.

[00:28:27] Erica Stanford: It enables you to send 1 cent here instantly between people. So you’ve got a whole use of potential use cases for that. Like micro transactions, like might be paying for content on a per use basis. I’ll pay you 5 cents to listen to this song, or 10 cents to read this article or. I’ll tip you 1 cent because you like my whatever, Instagram post or whatever.

you’ve got all of these potential use cases, so you’ve got remittance companies who, charge our bank amounts. You’ve got a third of the world’s population don’t have access to banking, who until now have been pretty much [00:29:00] screwed by the system you’ve got. Remittance companies charging up to 30%, a global average of 7% for the poorest people around the world to be able to send money.

and then you’ve got, crypto enables people to send money across borders or in micro amounts for much cheaper. Crypto allows for micro loans or, micropayments for things like doing work. People are being able to get, microinsurance or insurance that they never could get before because they didn’t have access to banking.

[00:29:26] Erica Stanford: That was a case in Indonesia. the cost of getting. Insurance payouts to people was so high cause they don’t have access to banking. There’s two and a half billion people around the world don’t have access to banking. So the only way to get insurance to money to these people was to fly a helicopter, to remote islands to bring them cash and that costs more than the money was worth.

[00:29:46] Erica Stanford: So they couldn’t get insurance. And now you’ve got these schemes that are bringing, digital let’s people, So all you need is a smartphone. And a lot of people around the world who don’t have access to a bank account have got a smartphone. So anyone that’s got a smartphone can now get a digital [00:30:00] wallet to receive a salary, to receive a loan, to get insurance to, to get a mortgage, to build a credit score for the first time.

[00:30:07] Erica Stanford: So you’ve got all of these, incredible use cases. And then we are still seeing. Big brand. aside from the sort of the bringing financial capabilities around the world, you’ve got the banking system is really now looking at crypto a from a, we need to get onto this because we realize our customers are interested, but also they’re using blockchain technology.

[00:30:28] Erica Stanford: The technology is built on to be able to move money, to have like digital certificates to show where money is moving. Cuz the way. Cryptos work. it’s money that’s sort of sent across blockchain, which without wanting to get too technical, you’ve got more transparency sending money over a blockchain than you do it in any other way.

[00:30:47] Erica Stanford: You can see super, super clearly this address and this Bitcoin or this money. To that address at that time, and it arrived at that time. You’ve got, unprecedented levels of transparency and you can have like digital [00:31:00] certificates attached to sort of each transaction to show exactly who sent what to where, and proof that it arrived.

[00:31:06] Erica Stanford: So you’ve got banks pretty much all looking at using this technology already, to do their own internal transactions or international transfers, which save them loads of money and loads of time and bring them lots more security. So you. All sorts of use cases. And then going back to that micropay thing, I absolutely believe you, you’ve already got loads of companies using it.

[00:31:31] Erica Stanford: Things like using crypto for incentives or loyalty rewards, or loyalty points, or I don’t know. We go out and you buy me a coffee and I wanna send you two quid, I, or $2. I absolutely believe that in the next few years it will be in built in messaging. I can send you a photo, I can send you a video, I can send you an audio file or a message, or I can send you a, whatever payment for whatever tiny amount that I want to send.

[00:31:56] Erica Stanford: So it,the potential use cases are evolving super [00:32:00] fast. There’s a load of really cool stuff happening, a load of really good stuff happening, which tends to be, quieter in the media than the problems because problem.

[00:32:10] Sergio Patterson \: It was so good to hear the use cases. I don’t think they’re talked enough about enough.

sorry to interrupt, but yeah, hearing those use cases actually, like I haven’t heard them said in that way before, and I think that’s more important than buy this new crypto today or get on this exchange. Like understanding what is the purpose is what’s missing

[00:32:29] Erica Stanford: totally. And one of the problems in crypto has been like the hype about the, this is the price of whatever and it’s gone up or gone down or whatever.

[00:32:37] Erica Stanford: And you’ve got the potential to have stable digital currencies. And again, one of the problems has been that you’ve got currently some asset back, or they say their asset backed dollar peg to cryptocurrencies. It goes back to there’s a lack of transparency there, and they say they’re backed by whatever.

[00:32:54] Erica Stanford: There’s no proof. And it’s dubious, but the potential is to really have asset [00:33:00] backed, local currencies that you can just transact in, in micro amounts. and there are some really cool companies doing a lot of really cool things. Plastic bankers is just one example, of that. So they, it is probably my favorite sort of use case.

of crypto, but they basically have a load of people who go out and collect waste plastic around the world in lots of countries around the world. And you’ve got waste plastic in a lot of places, has no real value. People just chuck it away and don’t think about it and put it in the ocean, put it in the environment.

[00:33:29] Erica Stanford: And there’s been various schemes around the world of to pay people and. To collect that. So if you go out and collect a bag of waste plastic, they’ll get given cash. But the problem had been, people that don’t have access to bank accounts, guys, it was tended to be women that would go out and collect waste plastic and guys knew that, women would be leaving at set time with cash and basically would be waiting outside to rob them, or drunk drunken husbands would rob the money.

[00:33:52] Erica Stanford: So for the first time, you’ve got like loads of people, Digital wallets so they can pay people to do things [00:34:00] like collect or pay people to do jobs in digital currency. And then they get a, like a credit score, a social score.

[00:34:07] Erica Stanford: They can get loans, they can get mortgages, they can make digital payments. They can save money for the first time digitally. huge’s, really exciting potential. Erica,

[00:34:16] Lee Michael Murphy: I love all the information you’ve given us today. but before go, can you give us the top scams that you’re seeing right now that people need to be aware of what’s trending, where people are losing their money?

[00:34:27] Lee Michael Murphy: Yeah,

[00:34:27] Erica Stanford: so there’s still Ponzi schemes. if anything says,pays a commission to bring you on board or, you get a guaranteed interest payment or something, just sit totally clear. I’d say that’s sort of the. scam that I see the most now is phishing scams.

[00:34:42] Erica Stanford: So what that is, is there’ll be a sites created to look like real sites,and they look really good and they’ll be links that, that look really good. And you’ve got scammers that duplicate sites, duplicate apps, and we’ll send out links in various ways, through email, through social [00:35:00] media, through befriending.

[00:35:00] Erica Stanford: So on, on the dating. there’s a thousand ways that they can get links in front of people, and then it’s getting people to click on a bad link and then do things like, Oh, enter your personal information just to check it’s you, or enter your private key or so forth. So it’s getting people to click on a bad link, which can be so cleverly hidden.

[00:35:23] Erica Stanford: A way to avoid that is basically don’t click on any link. If you want to go to a set platform, type that directly into Google, like you type the word out directly into Google, cuz that way you can sort of try and avoid, click on an link and just be super, super cautious.

[00:35:38] Lee Michael Murphy: I’ll say on the traditional side of banking, one of the best things you can do if you get email or someone saying, Oh, you owe this, or, you have money.

[00:35:46] Lee Michael Murphy: Don’t click on the link,go to the site directly and then solve the problem from there. That’s one of the biggest tips I think, we can give to just keep people safe on any financial banking app or crypto app,

[00:35:59] Erica Stanford: all that stuff. [00:36:00] Anything, and then I think the other thing is, we’ve seen it again just now.

don’t, just because there’s an exchange that says it’s safe or that people say it’s safe, don’t send your crypto anywhere. Cause there’s all these platforms that have said, Oh, if you send your crypto, we’ll give you guaranteed interest. Or, we’ll, do loans against it or we’ll pay you X or we’ll store a security on our exchange.

[00:36:21] Erica Stanford: Don’t just send crypto to store it somewhere because you think you’re getting a good return or you think it’s safe. be extra cautious, even if it’s a big name. And I’d say if you’re looking to have crypto make look into. Your own custody and how you can do that as safely as possible.

[00:36:37] Lee Michael Murphy: Which

[00:36:38] Sergio Patterson \: real quick, which exchanges do you trust? Like I’ve seen none. Coinbase is all over the news as a more of the

[00:36:45] Lee Michael Murphy: story. I think where Erica’s gonna go. None. Don’t trust any exchange

[00:36:48] Erica Stanford: yeah. Coinbase bases,there’s a bunch of lawsuits against it, but it’s a big exchange. it’s c now being the safest, but then ftx and, you’ve also got Binance, which is a big one, which a lot of people [00:37:00] trust. And, it’s, many people would say they’re too big to fail. And, I personally know people working at both and know that they’re very good people and all of that.

. But we’ve just seen FTX fail, and FTX in many ways was seen as the safest and the. and that has just collapsed and everybody lost all of their money. So my, So just no one basically. Sorry. Okay. ,

[00:37:22] Lee Michael Murphy: this is interesting. Your, now your keys, now your crypto, right? Yeah. Erica, give us a little bit about your book.

[00:37:28] Lee Michael Murphy: Where can everyone find it? it’s killing it right now. People love it. You’re best selling author.

[00:37:36] Erica Stanford: It’s called crypto was Fake Death missing billions and Industry Disruption about some of the biggest hacks and Ponzi schemes and scams in the space. And things like how the bubble got so big and how people fell for it.

it’s on Amazon in most countries, around the world. It’s at quite a few bookstores. there, there’s a universal link, but if you google crypto walls and my name, it will come up. but Amazon, much as I hate to give Jeff [00:38:00] Buzz more money away from independent retailers, is usually the easiest place.

[00:38:05] Erica Stanford: But, if you wanna do a good deed, go to a local book shop and get them to order it in.

[00:38:09] Sergio Patterson \: Is it in the states too? could

[00:38:11] Lee Michael Murphy: I buy

[00:38:11] Erica Stanford: an shop here? Yeah. Amazon amazon.com.

[00:38:13] Lee Michael Murphy: That’s awesome. Thank you so much, Erica. We love having you.

[00:38:16] Lee Michael Murphy: Thanks for all the wonderful information you gave us. You’ve, you’re doing amazing stuff and we appreciate everything you’re doing in this space, keeping people safe. Thank you so much for having me on. anytime. We’re gonna probably have to have you back on the, whenever the next crypto scam.

[00:38:28] Sergio Patterson \: Matt, we have another cohost.

[00:38:31] Sergio Patterson \: He’s, really into crypto. He missed

[00:38:32] Lee Michael Murphy: out. He would’ve loved to hear everything you had to say.

[00:38:38] Erica Stanford: Your cold gets better.

[00:38:39] Sergio Patterson \: I know. It’s, Maybe I’ll keep it though. Keep

[00:38:40] Lee Michael Murphy: the voice. Keep the voice. Right folks. You’ve been listening to the free retiree show. So long for now.