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You are here: Home / Economics / Grifters Gonna Grift / Late Night C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: #CryptoShills for Cash (Fiat Currency Only)

Late Night C.R.E.A.M. Open Thread: #CryptoShills for Cash (Fiat Currency Only)

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On Monday, an independent researcher who exposes hacks and scams in the world of crypto published a purported list of influencers and how much they charge to “shill” crypto projects on Twitter. The list quickly went viral, starting a conversation about how essentially any cryptocurrency project can simply pay influencers to retweet or promote their projects to hundreds of thousands or millions of people on social media…

Good to know somebody‘s keeping an eye on these grifters:
The spreadsheet includes dozens of influencers including current and former professional athletes and Lindsay Lohan, many with tens of thousands of followers and in some cases verified accounts. Motherboard reviewed the Twitter feeds of dozens of the accounts on the list, and many of them claim in their profiles that they promote crypto projects. Some of them say, specifically, that they “shill” crypto. Some of them are self-claimed “crypto promoters” or “crypto influencers.” Many have contact info for paid partnerships or promotions. Others don’t, and even advise that their tweets are “not financial advice.”

All of the accounts Motherboard reviewed regularly promote obscure coins, NFTs, and other cryptocurrency projects.

The prices on the list vary. According to the spreadsheet, retweets are less expensive than “shill tweets.” There is also a column for “package deal” which includes two shill tweets and a retweet. Prices generally range from a few hundred dollars for a retweet to as much as $25,000 for a shill tweet from Lohan. The spreadsheet is also selling a shill tweet from “all accounts” for $80,000.

ZachXBT, one of a growing group of a handful of skilled independent investigators are uncovering high profile scams who published the spreadsheet, told Motherboard that the list came from a “marketing firm” but did not say which one…

Some of these responses make clear that the world of paid crypto shilling is a wild one, with deeply varying standards around things like vetting projects and disclosing whether a tweet is a paid promotion or not. It can also be difficult to tell what is a paid promotion and what is simply indistinguishable from one…

Let the market decide!

Reader Interactions

49Comments

  1. 1.

    bbleh

    I understand that crypto is big in the, ah, less-informed-and/or-cognitively-differently-abled set, notably but not exclusively MAGA and Q worlds, but it still smacks the gob that there are SO many marks with SO much extra cash to extract that there can actually exist a LARGE cast of intermediaries whom the true grift-meisters consider it worthwhile to pay such outrageous sums of money.  Hundreds or thousands for a tweet or two?  I just … can’t even.

  3. 3.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    as someone who barely knows who Lindsey Lohan is, and doesn’t follow any of that sort of “influencer”, unless Patton Oswalt counts, the ones that gall me are alleged environmental activists like Larry David (as much as those commercials crack me up) and Matt Damon (who spent so many years whining that Obama didn’t have any “balls” on this and other issues) shilling for this rolling economic disaster.

    Bitcoin—the world’s oldest and most popular form of cryptocurrency, with a total market value that topped $1.3 trillion—now eats up half a percentage point of all the electricity consumed in the world. That puts it on par with the usage of the entire country of Sweden. In fact, Google could power all of its global operations on that amount of energy, seven times over. In comparison with more traditional online banking, a single bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 330,000 credit card transactions.

  4. 4.

    Ken

    they take money and do the promotion and if it ends up being a scam they delete the tweet later

    I’m obliquely reminded of the rather weird idea, found in some rather weird Christian circles, that one can “regain” one’s virginity.

  6. 6.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    in other CREAM news, another trump property is about to be re-named

    Checking Out: Trump Hotel Sale Will End an Era
    The $375 million sale of a Washington hotel that served as an influence and access bazaar for lawmakers, administration officials and other Trump allies is slated to be finalized this month.

    The Trump family took out a $170 million loan from Deutsche Bank in 2014 to finance renovations to the building. But even after that loan is paid off and various payments the family made to cover operating losses are accounted for, the family will generate a profit of about $100 million, House investigators estimated after the sale was announced.

    I generally think Nancy Pelosi knows a lot more about the law and politics than I do, but I’ll never understand not invoking emoluments violations in the first impeachment. I don’t recall any mention of the question in Schiff’s book, though I’m not sure

  8. 8.

    Wag

    @Ken:
    I had totally forgotten that recovered virginity was an actual concept. Thanks for the laughs and the reminder.

  10. 10.

    robmassing

    Seems bonkers to pay all that money for someone to pimp your worthless product. I bet another grifter is telling the crypto bros (for a small fee) what a great return on investment they’re getting.

  13. 13.

    bbleh

    @Major Major Major Major: Well, that’s because they’re suppressing it!  But Market Forces™ are like the tides — if you build a wall, they eventually find a way to flow around it.  That’s why it’s so important to get in on the ground floor!  It won’t be long, you know, before it’s obvious to everyone, and then it’ll be too late!

    Subscribe to my newsletter for more valuable insights and tips to the hottest buys!  Only $49.99 a month (card, Venmo or PayPal only).

  15. 15.

    eversor

    @robmassing:

    Not gonna lie I made a shit load of cash of crypto.   Long story short I got in when GPU mining was still a thing for bitcoin using nvidia CUDA and then got the fuck out quick.  This was back in the days of intel Core2 Duo or Quad days and directX 10 series GPU instruction sets.   Now, unless you own a farm you’re hosting in a warehouse it’s a money waster.  Even in edge home cases like me (I have three computers one with a 2080 super the others with 3090s which is a 2 grand GPU if you can find it, usually more) you’re f’d.  The best you can do is dumb mine ethereum if you don’t foot your own electric bill because if you do, money is lost.   Even my “good” box (64 CPU cores, 128gb RAM, server grade intel optane over PCIE 4.0, samsung server SSDS over PCIE 4.0, nvidia 3090, 32 tb of spinners off a hardware RAID card) can’t mine fast enough to make it worth the power bill.  And for those who don’t know computers, that thing is a beast that costs well over 20k.  But I use it for side jobs and run a TON of VMs off it through Hyper-V so it paid for itself in a year.   I can simmulate a multi switch network off it internally running crap like hadoop and it screams through it laughing at it.  My “fun” box is a 10 core 32gb intel SSD box with a 2080 super pushing a 1440p ultra wide at 165hz gsync.  Don’t get me started on the monitors we use for video editing those damn things clock at 30k for a 20inch screen and will cause house fires (editing monitors are fucking evil).

  16. 16.

    Chetan Murthy

    @eversor: I knew a guy who made a ton back in the early, early days, too: enough to buy a Tesla Model S when it was the toy of techbros.  This is how it works with a successful pyramid scheme when you get in on the ground floor, eh?  All the skill luck grift is in knowing it’s gonna be successful ….. when he was doin’ it, all you needed was a spare machine in your closet, not even fancy hardware.

    Just to be clear, the above is an argument for *not* getting into crypto, just as it’s an argument for not timing the stock market: unless you have inside information, it’s just gambling.

  18. 18.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Wag: I don’t know if @eversor is a troll or not, but for sure, nobody should be making cryptocurrency speculation look glamorous and high-tech: it’s sordid and sketchy AF.  I have a friend who trades it (he used to work in the financial biz for trading firms, so this is just another market to him) and he tells me that when he’s got active positions, he has to monitor them basically 24×7, across many different streams of rumors and bullshit, in order to know when to buy/sell.  It’s *exhausting* work.  Honestly, I don’t know why he does it.

  20. 20.

    Felanius Kootea

    @eversor: Damn!  You mean I could have used my deep learning set up to become a gazillionaire?  All those wasted Nvidia Titan RTX GPUs.

    Waaah!!!!

    Sob :(.

  22. 22.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Chetan Murthy: I contracted with some bitcoin website for a while back when it was like $500. They paid in btc, sometimes I get grumpy to think that I just sold it for, you know, rent money. It was the obviously correct thing to do but damn maybe I should have squirreled one away just to see.

    I actually got an email from some random user the other day, apparently the site just did a rug pull (like ten years later) lol. Like I’d know how to help. He was obviously messaging everybody he could find as having any attachment to the company. ETA should probably take that off LinkedIn

  24. 24.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Major Major Major Major: I never beat myself up over lack of foresight when it comes to market movements.  I mean, forget BTC, if I’d only know that  GOOG would go up so much over the last 10yr …. (forget the massive runup before then !!!) I could have ….. etc, etc, etc.  Hindsight is 20/20, etc, etc.

  28. 28.

    StringOnAStick

    The people I’ve seen starting to dabble in btc over the last year are lower middle class, single earner fathers desperate to try to make extra $ to support their wife and kids; that’s some of who are getting sucked in at this late date after all the stories of  “I got rich trading btc, buy my market timing service so you can be too!”. To me it’s another sad example of the desperation of trying to provide for your family without the skills for a higher paying job, and the grifters preying on that segment of the population.  Ain’t capitalism grand?

  29. 29.

    Jay

    @Wag:

    I had a friend get into crypto mining in the early days.

    The Bitcoin he “mined” for about $0.15 in electricity, he “sold” at one of the peaks for about $4,500.

    Bought him a house, in Saskatoon, but still, not bad for a couple years of mining, and almost a decade of waiting.

  31. 31.

    Another Scott

    @bbleh: There was a story going around in economics circles a few years ago that argued that US economic growth had evolved into a series of bubbles and crashes: S&L deregulation, Dot Com, housing, etc.  Of course, there were regularly booms and depressions before the 1900s, too.

    The SEC was supposed to rein in these excesses.  Maybe their charter needs to be expanded…

    Cheers,

    Scott.

  32. 32.

    Matt McIrvin

    “Senator Eloise Williams” seems to be one of these characters with an elaborately fictitious bio who sells it all as a big joke, kind of like those websites of fake news that aren’t that funny but have a “satire” disclaimer down at the bottom. Not surprised there’s paid kidding on the square involved.

  36. 36.

    Poe Larity

    Next you haters will be telling me to stop reading Burma-Shave billboards and watching Bill Cosby pudding commercials.

  39. 39.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    I got turned off on Bitcoin because it was deflationary by design, obviously geared to benefit early adopters and hoarders at the expense of people who were late to the party, as it were. Between that and its extreme volatility, it never made sense to me, and that was before the escalating environmental impact of cryptocurrency became apparent. (I knew that diminishing returns on mining would make life difficult down the line, but I hadn’t connected the dots to the extraordinary and constantly increasing energy demands.)

    Money is supposed to be either a store of value or a medium of exchange, right? I have yet to see a cryptocurrency that performs satisfactorily on either front.

  40. 40.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @eversor:

    Laughing my ass off. Self-righteous prick prolly never could deliver a climax.

  41. 41.

    BellyCat

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: In comparison with more traditional online banking, a single bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 330,000 credit card transactions.

    So much for worrying about leaving a light on in an empty room or wearing a sweater in winter to reduce energy consumption. //

    Lots of established media outlets gotta be pissed off that their “legitimate” shilling (of ads and product placement) is being infringed by this “illegitimate” shilling (of ads and product placement) which is TOTALLY different because reasons.

  42. 42.

    Geminid

    @eversor: Like a lot of pelple, I’ve been waiting for Florida Representative Matt Gaetz to be indicted for child sex trafficking. Federal prosecutors have been working on it for close to a year now. Their problem is to come up with more and better witnesses than his former party “wingman” Joel Greenburg.

    Mr. Greenburg was the elected Seminole County Tax Collector until he was indicted in 2020 for cyberstalking a political opponent. A superseding indictment last May charged Greenberg with 33 felonies. One of the lesser crimes was using public funds to buy a crypto mining rig. When first installed the rig blew the circuit breakers. Then Greenberg had it placed in a purpose built room, where the mining module started a fire. The insurance company refused to pay the claim because of Greenberg’s negligence.

    Greenberg is so sketchy that a jury would never convict Gaetz on his testimony. There are reports that prosecutors have developed more witnesses against Gaetz. One is a former DJ who has pled guilty to illegal distribution of Adderall, apparantly a favorite recreational drug now.

    I guess we’ll see next month if prosecutors have got the goods on Gaetz. That’s when Greenberg’s oft-postponed sentencing has been rescheduled.

  43. 43.

    sab

    Norm Ornstein’s lost dog came home on his own at 4 a.m. Ornstein posted it on his twitter account.

  45. 45.

    Ken

    @Geminid: Adderall, apparantly a favorite recreational drug now.

    So like, “I used to steal opiates from my grandma’s medicine cabinet, but now that they’ve cracked down on those, I steal ADHD meds from my kid’s medicine cabinet.”

  49. 49.

    kindness

    Jesus the whole thing is a scam.  Crypto, NFTs, they all are running get rich quick schemes.

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