How do your favorite bloggers scam children out of money? A new legal way to cheat
Everyone has already heard about financial pyramids, betting advertising, casinos and account promotion. But progress does not stand still, and modern problems require modern solutions. And Russian bloggers offered such solutions to their audience – scams using their own memcoins (unsupported cryptocurrencies). The most interesting thing is that this area is not regulated in any way by our legislation, and this means that this fraudulent method is legal from the point of view of the law.
In this article, we will analyze a fraudulent scheme using the creation of a memcoin using the example of the case of blogger-streamer Jesus. Let's talk about all the stages of this scam – how bloggers do it, why they do it, why they won't get anything for it and look at a real example – the Jesus token $BOOBA (Boobacoin).
But first, in order to understand the context and the entire scheme, you need to understand some subtleties. What are memcoins, fantokens, how does fair launch work – their “honest” launch.
Table of contents:
2. The mechanism for launching your own cryptocurrency.
3. The essence of the fraudulent scheme. How do bloggers legally cheat children out of money?
4. How did blogger Jesus scam his audience out of money?
5. Legal method of fraud. Why won’t bloggers get anything for this?
6. Are your favorite bloggers no longer your bro? Appeal to the audience and bloggers.
1. Introduction to the context. What is the value of cryptocurrencies? Hype of memcoins and why Russian bloggers were attracted to scam?
Recently, the memecoin narrative has been spreading strongly in the crypto market. These are coins that are not backed by anything other than the community and its belief in growth. Some of them grew by tens of thousands of percent and broke through the capitalization of a billion, but the majority (99%+) went to zero.
On average, more than five thousand memcoins are created every month. To understand why almost all of them go to zero and only a few find their market fit (product-market fit and application), it is necessary to understand how the value of these tokens is formed.
What is the value of cryptocurrencies?
The main value of any cryptocurrency (including memcoins, fan tokens) lies in their utility (from the English utility – usefulness). In other words, where and how is this token used? The answer to this question determines the demand for a given token.
There are cryptocurrencies backed by technology. For example, Ethereum is the second largest cryptocurrency on the market. It is based on smart contract technology, which allows you to program any action on the network – purchase | selling anything, transferring rights, executing a certain algorithm, and so on. People use this technology and pay a fee in $ETH coin to use it. This creates demand. In order to create something or perform any operation on Ethereum, you need to spend $ETH.
Now to memcoins and fan tokens. For example, a fan token of the Manchester City football club gives the right to buy tickets to the team’s matches and branded merchandise at special prices. Owning the sensational NFT Milady gives you access to a community of people deeply immersed in crypto, and also allows you to receive retrodrops from other projects – you simply hold this NFT (for ease of understanding, we will consider NFTs and memcoins equivalent) and for this you receive rewards in tokens of other projects.
The larger and more useful the utility of a memcoin, the greater the demand for it, and, accordingly, the price. After all, price is a direct characteristic of supply and demand.
Also, the price of memcoin depends on the community’s faith in its growth. For example, the $PEPE memcoin ($3 billion capitalization) is not used anywhere and does not have any utility, but it has such a strong community that even without its use it is bought back and held in wallets for huge sums. In order for a memcoin to be so popular, it must be viral, it must have a strong team that deeply understands crypto and has extensive experience in this market, and, of course, a strong community, which is simply impossible for an amateur to build.
Now that we've covered some of the basics, let's move on to the important point – the legal basis for memcoins.
What are memcoins from a legal point of view? The answer is nothing. It's not a stock, it's not a security, it's empty space. Therefore, this area is not regulated by any law. And this is very convenient for the creators of memcoins – dummies. Because no matter what you do with your coin, no matter how you mislead buyers, no matter how you manipulate its price, you will get nothing for it.
To the context.
There is currently a renaissance of memcoins in the crypto market. Platforms have appeared that allow you to launch your memcoin in just a couple of minutes. And in order for people to start buying it, it is enough to announce it either through purchasing advertising, or tell your audience about it.
Who has an audience?
Right. From bloggers. Therefore, it is as logical as possible that there were a number of characters who decided to make easy money. After all, where there is a trend, there are big money. This is clear to everyone. And if any of them are worried about their reputation, respect their audience and decided to bypass this trend, then many don’t care. What can we talk about if the majority of Russian popular people advertise casinos and bets to an audience, essentially children, who do not yet have their own formed view of the world. They, after all, do not yet understand that in order to earn significant money, they need to go through a certain path, gain knowledge, and learn to apply it. The easiest way to induce FOMO (lost profit syndrome) in children is to show them a few missed bets, show them your rich life. And they already want it too. This is how an already serious problem for today’s youth develops – gambling addiction.
2. The mechanism for launching your own cryptocurrency.
Anyone can launch their own cryptocurrency. Technologies have reached the point where this can be done in just a few minutes, just by coming up with a name, logo and the total number of tokens.
There are a number of platforms through which you can launch memcoin using fair launch.
Fair Launch is a fair way to launch a token. You declare the creation of a token, give the address of its contract, and people throw their money there in another cryptocurrency (it could be $TON, $SOL, $TRX, depending on which blockchain the token is created on). Then they receive a number of tokens proportional to how much money they threw in.
The mechanism here is as follows:
1. Come up with a name, logo and total volume of tokens;
2. Your memcoin automatically appears in the blockchain and has its own contract address in it;
3. Fair launch begins, during which people throw money into the contract and receive your memcoin in their wallet;
4. You pour liquidity into the memcoin (in other words, you throw your money into it, a small amount. It is different on different blockchains);
5. You start advertising the token so that more people buy it;
6. As soon as a token reaches a certain capitalization (this is the price of a token multiplied by their total number. In other words, the total value of all tokens in circulation), it automatically receives a listing on decentralized trading platforms (DEX – Decentralized Exchange). From now on, this token can be purchased | sell on these sites;
7. That's it. The further development of memcoin depends only on the demand for it. People buy – it grows. People sell – it falls.
Demand can also be regulated by the manipulations of the memcoin creator. He can say that he will develop it, that he will buy it back below a certain price, that he will arrange partnerships that will increase its utility. Then, it may actually do this, or it may not, it may just give up on the token and it will roll away.
So what then is the fraudulent scheme if fair launch is a fair launch? Let's figure it out.
3. The essence of the fraudulent scheme. How do bloggers legally scam money using cryptocurrencies?
The scheme is as simple as possible. In the previous section, we looked at how to launch your own cryptocurrency – your memcoin. Now let's figure out how you can cheat at this stage in order to earn all the money with which people buy your coin.
The essence of memcoins is pyramidal. As I said above, if memcoin is bought, it grows, if it is sold, it falls. Whoever bought it before everyone else can stay in the black by selling it to the losers, who will buy it at a much higher price at FOMO. Well, the losers who bought it at the most expensive prices will forever remain in the red.
What do “smart” bloggers do?
Before they launch fair launch and start selling their memcoin, they purchase it themselves. Thus, they buy the coin at the cheapest price. Further, in proportion to purchases, the price of the coin begins to rise, children buy the coin in the hope of growth, the blogger continues to advertise it. And then, when it has reached a certain point, it begins to sell it. Who should I sell to? The same kids who believe in growth because of the blogger’s constant mentions that he is making history and creating a new Bitcoin.
As a result, we get – first the creator of the coin purchases himself, then he “shoves” his coin to the goyim, and then, continuing to “shove” it, he unloads his original position. And due to the fact that the price of the coin has increased due to purchases and demand, he sells it tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times more expensive than he bought at the start.
Convenient and not at all difficult, right? All you need for such a scam is two brains and a gullible audience, eating any nonsense said by their idol.
4. How did blogger Jesus scam his audience out of money? $2.7 million from gullible subscribers.
In the spring of 2024, blogger Jesus, with a huge audience on Twitch and YouTube, announced the launch of his memecoin $BOOBA (Boobacoin).
I am attaching a chart of the coin below.
At its peak, the coin cost $0.12 TON, and its capitalization was equal to $2.7 million. You can see what is happening with it today in the graph above.
What was Jesus doing? Step by step.
Everything according to the scheme described in the section above. Jesus opened a presale for the coin.
He pre-purchased $40,000. He has an argument for this – they say, “It wasn’t me who bought it, it was someone who sniped (tracked) my wallet and when I made a test transaction on the coin contract, someone threw in 40 thousand dollars and managed to buy the coin first”.
Well, yes, well, yes. Someone from your audience loves risk so much that without any confirmation that this is a real contract, he sent 4 million rubles to the address. Of course, the wallets of the founders of large crypto projects are monitored, there are entire teams that write software for this, but Jesus’ wallet… And even without confirmation that this is really the contract that is needed… It even sounds strange. In fact, no one would risk such a sum and send it at random.
Then Jesus posted the coin contract publicly, and people started buying. In total, subscribers gave him a little more than $2.7 million. This is about 250 million rubles at that rate. A good profit, to say the least.
What happened next?
Of course, the coin began to fall. Everything according to the plan. Jesus' team and the blogger himself started selling it. As a result, its price as of today has fallen to 0.0034 $TON, that is, 35 times.
And, of course, everyone who bought this coin today has lost almost the entire amount. Who earned it then, you ask?
Those who purchased before everyone else were Jesus' team and a few subscribers who turned out to be the most agile.
Of course, they would not be able to sell the entire volume of purchased tokens at once – the fall would be too rapid. Therefore, Jesus continued and, by the way, continues to warm up his audience to buy $BOOBA.
And recently he even announced the creation of his own sweepstakes, payments within which will be made in his $BOOBA token.
The result is that Jesus became several million dollars richer, and the audience became a little poorer (why, they chipped in a couple of thousand for a new apartment for their idol). At the same time, the blogger also continues to advertise his memcoin and does not worry about his safety and freedom, because he knows very well that crypto is practically not regulated by the legislation of the Russian Federation.
5. Legal method of fraud. Why won’t bloggers get anything for this?
Why is this method of fraud still legal in our country? The answer to this question is simple – today there is no clear regulatory framework in the field of cryptocurrencies. $BOOBA is not a currency, it is not a product, it is an object not endowed with any property or other categories of rights. It's just air. And if this is air, not enshrined in any way in the legislation, then there is no reason to initiate any criminal cases.
The second reason is that it is too difficult. In order to understand what the fraud is here and how the creator of the cryptocurrency takes money from people, you need to understand the entire scheme for launching such coins. You need to study the cases. Look at foreign practice – what articles do influencers fall under there, how does the SEC (US Securities Commission) protect its citizens from such schemes. This is too difficult for our law enforcement system. So far, we cannot even adopt a law on mining in adequate formulations, let alone memcoins.
By the way, if we talk about foreign practice, then in this material You can read how the FBI caught market makers of memcoins (companies that are involved in the marketing and development of memcoins) and what serious charges were brought against them.
It's a strange situation. Federal Law 259 on CFA was issued, which explicitly prohibits advertising not only of cryptocurrencies, but even of mining services (even though mining itself is permitted and is now regulated by our legislation, there is a separate whole series of questions for those who wrote this law). And here there is an advertisement not just for some fundamental cryptocurrency, like $BTC or $ETH, but for a full-fledged scam project from a fairly well-known blogger.
6. Are your favorite bloggers no longer your bro?
In drawing conclusions from this material, I would like to make two points. The first will be for the audience of similar bloggers, the second – for the bloggers themselves.
First. I understand that for many children, fans of streamers and bloggers, these people are role models. They will never believe that their idol wants to deceive them until they themselves fall for their schemes. But you need to understand one simple thing – wealth and success are not given just like that. No one will let their entire huge audience earn money and tell you some secrets of making money for free. No bets, no memcoins from personalities like Jesus will bring you money. In this situation, only he and his team make money. All. This is just another way to monetize your popularity, albeit illegal. You must understand this.
Whether it’s Jesus, Ivan Gai (who also launched his own cryptocurrency), Morgenstern (who went even further and launched several memcoins that went to zero) or any other celebrity, you shouldn’t think that they have the goal of making you richer. No. They make themselves richer. The audience for them is a source of income. I understand that thoughts arise, like “well, he has a huge audience, how will he cheat everyone? Everyone will turn their backs on him! How will he continue to earn money? Yes, very simple. Did a lot of people turn their backs on Jesus or Morgen? Not really. As we watched the streams of the first, as we listened to the songs of the second, so it will continue. They are doing well. They only became richer.
If such actions seem out of the ordinary to your moral values, then for such characters it is in the order of things.
Now the second point. Here I will turn to the bloggers themselves who deal in such things:
I will not appeal to you to morality and conscience, talk about the boomerang effect and karma. If you take such steps, then obviously you don’t care about your conscience. You better think about the criminal consequences of such steps. Today, crypto is not regulated in any way by law. And tomorrow? And tomorrow everything can happen. And those fraudulent schemes that seem unobvious today may become clear as day tomorrow. And then everything will fall into place. Everyone who does not agree will receive a sentence. And given society’s current attitude towards rich bloggers, it won’t be easy to come to an agreement.
Thank you all for reading this material. I would be very grateful for your like, repost, subscription to the channel and spreading the word.
If you don’t want to find yourself in the herd of deceived people – tapping a hamster, donating to bloggers for new apartments, then study modern technologies (blockchain, artificial intelligence), delve into it and subscribe to our Telegram channel. Hugged everyone.
