“I dressed up as a kid to go undercover in the crypto world and sold a dog photo as an NFT for $20k”
Award-winning journalist Ian Halperin went undercover to lift the lid on the mysterious world of cryptocurrency and uncovered shocking details about the scale of deaths among the new crypto millionaires
A journalist went “undercover” in the world of cryptocurrency to reveal the shocking scale of suspected murders and fake deaths among the new crypto elite.
After spending three years in the industry, which he described as “the Wild West”, Ian Halperin has said it is overflowing with “child millionaires” who were likely murdered or faked their own deaths.
The 58-year-old undercover journalist donned ‘baseball caps with crazy logos’ to fit in with the industry’s elite to research his new book – ‘Crypto Boy: Inside The Success, Sex, Dirty Money, Murder & Wild World of The Blockchain ‘ .
After being accepted into the industry’s inner circles, he even managed to sell a photograph of two dogs sleeping as an NFT for $20k to a crypto investor.
Murder and mayhem
The author said fears that many young millionaires making huge sums of money in crypto could have been murdered or faked their own deaths, estimating that there have been hundreds of mysterious deaths linked to the industry.
He told the Mirror: “That’s the one thing that scared me about my investigation, how many young millionaires ended up being murdered.”
Ian reveals prominent cases, including the “deaths” of Gerald Cotten, Mircea Popescu, Nikolai Mushegian and Autumn Radtke, in his latest book, that there are “very mysterious circumstances surrounding all their deaths”.
He added: “The number could be much higher. Absolutely. From my research we know about two dozen, but if we go very deep it’s probably 100s that have been murdered in the last 10 years.”
In the past year, cryptocurrencies and related industries such as NFTs have been thrown into crisis following a series of scandals with companies collapsing. Ian compared the secretive industry to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.
Despite the killing and chaos, Ian still believes cryptocurrencies are “the way of the future” and that the US is “behind the times” in accepting crypto as legitimate currency.
He also revealed the volatility of the wealth gained through crypto saying: “Crypto gurus and the lifestyles they lead are ridiculous. One month they’re flying high and driving Rolls Royces, six months later they’re practically homeless.”
Going undercover
Ian is a best-selling author and award-winning film director who has a long history of going undercover. After one undercover assignment, he famously predicted Michael Jackson’s death six months in advance despite the singer’s team rejecting the idea as they completed multi-million dollar deals to get him to perform.
He explained how he dressed up to fit in with the young crypto gurus: “I started wearing baseball caps with crazy logos and cool Adidas running shoes to start looking like a kid because the industry is dominated by kids. I met kids who started at 6 and were billionaires by 19 or 20.”
He also presented himself as an NFT artist. NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are used to digitally verify the owner of a digital artwork on a blockchain similar to that used for cryptocurrencies.
While in Georgia researching how countries are adopting crypto, he saw two dogs sleeping on the peaceful shores of the Black Sea and took the photo he eventually sold for $20k as an NFT.
Fears that crypto millionaires are faking their own deaths
The journalist said he believed a number of crypto billionaires faked their own deaths after fearing for their lives. He said: “There are at least two dozen who disappeared or faked their deaths.
“A lot of this doesn’t make sense, because if it was one or two fine. But there are dozens. And that’s the scary thing.
“People seem to want to take these rich crypto kids out for one reason or another. There are all kinds of theories why. Because a lot of them influence the markets and drive the markets. And sometimes it’s not in a way that they threaten them wishes.”
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One such mysterious case was the death of Gerald Cotten, owner of one of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, in 2018
In 2019, his business Quadriga Fintech Solutions folded and the company filed for bankruptcy with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.
Ian said: “His company was on the verge of losing everything at the time of his death. He was over $200 million in debt. There has been much speculation as to whether he died or whether he faked his own death to throw off the Securities and Exchange Commission’s examination.
“One of his former friends said he might have had plastic surgery and now lives in a foreign country.”
One of the most prominent criminal cases related to crypto is Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the billionaire founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who is currently facing multiple fraud charges. Insiders told Ian FTX was a ‘complete scam’
He said: “SBF is probably safer in prison than he is in the free world. When you get into crypto and things start to deteriorate you get angry investors and they want revenge.”
A number of celebrities were also caught up in the FTX scandal. Ian said: “People like Gisele (Bündchen), Tom Brady and Shaquille O’Neal were caught up in it. I firmly conclude that they were deceived so badly.
“They should have done more due diligence. The fact that they put their names to FTX influenced hundreds of thousands of people to get involved and eventually get ripped off. I feel bad for the celebrities, but they only have themselves to blame.”
Despite everything, he is optimistic about the future of the industry, especially as regulation comes.
He said: “Now it’s the Wild West. Then again if you look at the dot.com bubble back in 1998/99 it was called the Wild West. It’s the same thing.
“I didn’t know anything about crypto before I went undercover. But after three years of research, I predict it’s the way of the future. I really think five years from now most people will have crypto wallets in the western world.”
Ian Halperin’s latest book reveals everything he learned undercover, titled “Crypto Boy: Inside The Success, Sex, Dirty Money, Murder & Wild World of The Blockchain”. It is exclusively available on all Amazon sites
