Also available in Italy on Netflix, BitConned talks about cryptocurrencies but not Bitcoin, despite the fact that the title of the documentary would suggest so. Talk about the Centra scandal, the first and largest in this sector, which anticipated the FTX case.
The movie is directed by Bryan Storkel and told through the voices of the protagonists, that is, the founders of this startup nata a Miami from the ashes of a luxury car rental service: Robert Farkas, Sohrab Sharma and Raymond Trapani. The first served a year in prison for this affair, the second is still in prison, the third, on the other hand, did practically not even spend a day behind bars. Even though he was the mastermind of everything.
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youtube: Bitconned trailer
Center and that president invented on Google
Centra’s idea was simple: create yet another cryptocurrency and above all develop a platform (and also a credit card) that would allow cryptocurrencies to be converted into money and spent in the real world, paying in shops and online as is done with euros, dollars and so on. It was a nice idea, but it never worked.
If the story of Centra It seems a bit reminiscent of Theranos, it’s because it’s a bit like this: in both cases, we start from a convincing and potentially successful idea and use technology to deceive people and especially investors. There is a difference, however: malice and the intention to harm others. If Elizabeth Holmes (from what we know) actually set out with the idea of bringing some benefit to the community, Ray Trapani did not. He immediately has the idea of cheating others, and declares it openly. “I wanted to become a criminal,” we hear him say several times in the movie. Indeed: “I wanted to become a criminal and get rich”, which seems to be the ultimate goal of his life.
Without giving excessive spoilers (but the story is now in the public domain), nothing about Centra worked from the beginning and from the beginning it was more or less completely fake: there was the Visa logo on the non-existent and unusable credit card shown on the site (which was this), but Visa knew nothing about it and requested and obtained that the trademark be removed after discovering it. The bio of the founders on LinkedIn (this is the one in Trapani) they were artfully constructed, with studies and previous work experiences that were totally invented. Not even the president, a certain Michael Edwards, ever existed: “We thought we needed a more mature figure to show on the outside, so we invented him.” Literally, they made it up: they searched on Google for “old white guy”, that is, “adult white man”, they chose a photo and a name at random and that became the president of Centra. And when the financiers began to get suspicious about the fact that he never appeared anywhere and demanded to meet him, a statement appeared mourning his passing. Because obviously the non-existent Michael Edwards had died in a tragic car accident.
Ray Trapani’s grandfather, who later briefly became president of Centra Ray Trapani’s grandfather in a scene from BitConned
instagram: a recent post by Ray Trapani
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With the faces of Paris Hilton and Floyd Mayweather
Despite all this, business for Centra is booming: founded in 2017, in just a few weeks the company managed to raise financing for over 30 million of dollars, from investors large and small, in the United States and abroad. Almost 7 years later, none of them have yet received a penny back.
To contribute to success, in addition to clean face of the founders, to theirs profili social all well-groomed and apparently impeccable and to a site that promised disasters and easy money, even the promotional action (conscious or unconscious) of YouTubers well-known in the world of crypto and paid testimonials such as Paris Hilton, musician DJ Khaled and boxer Floyd Mayweather, as we reported on Italian Tech at the beginning of 2022. The castle of lies begins to sway between the summer and autumn of 2017, when customers begin to ask questions, and finally collapses on October 27 of that year, when the New York Times publishes an article (This) that takes everything apart piece by piece.
Trapani is coming arrested on April 20, 2018, after he had also gotten his family into trouble to repay debts and also used his grandfather’s face (who “maybe was in the mafia”, as he himself says in the film) to invent another false president after Michael Edwards. From then on, things don’t go as one might expect for him: today he is on the loose, he has a profile on Instagram where he introduces himself to his 10 thousand followers as “the star of Bitconned on Netflix” and is ready to launch into a new business. He would like to set up a loan agencyaccording to rumors.
From this bankrupt company in short, it came out decidedly well and perhaps even better than before, as well as from Storkel’s documentary. Which honestly makes it a far too flattering portrait, all things considered: it’s only towards the end that we talk about convictions, about uncompensated victims, about the fact that everything that was done was wrong. The film doesn’t take a position and lets the viewer form an opinion of him, and maybe that’s just as well: as some colleagues abroad have written, it’s a sort of “manual of the perfect con man”. And it’s great writing Attention aimed at all those who are tempted (even today and despite everything) to invest in cryptocurrencies, where this type of scam is far from rare, because it is based on two very strong levers: the complexity of the topic, which makes it difficult to really understand anything about it , and above all the innate, human and understandable desire to make money of people. Which however often leads to dangerous roads.
@capoema