When Fraud is Pitched as Freedom: Review of “Everyone Is Lying to You for Money”
The O.C. actor Ben McKenzie explores the question: is all of crypto a scam that leaves a few people holding the bag?
For Ben McKenzie, an actor-turned-investigative-journalist, crypto never made sense. While proponents of crypto incessantly promoted financial independence from corrupt or entrenched institutions, all McKenzie could see was the fluctuating price of the coins, like a tachycardia on an EKG.
So McKenzie set out to chronicle the cult of bitcoin and crypto, venturing to El Salvador to explore their “bitcoin city,” and even landing interviews with two founders of crypto exchanges now serving time in prison for fraud.
In El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele has allegedly been building a “bitcoin city,” McKenzie found just one American “bitcoin resident” hanging out in a hammock and a hut, holding out for the bitcoin revolution to start. The local El Salvadoreans whose land was designated for the crypto city were offered a paltry take-it-or-leave-it buyout to move from their land and their ancestral homes. Meanwhile, a walk through El Salvador’s street markets revealed that no vendors were taking bitcoin, only cash.
Back in the United States, McKenzie found that even the vendors at a 2022 Miami crypto conference weren’t taking bitcoin. When the system did work, he was told, the transactions could take up to 15 minutes to process–far from the seamless, borderless exchange of funds that was being advertised on conference stages.
At that same conference, the founder of Celsius, Alex Mashinsky, sat with McKenzie to discuss the industry. McKenzie, who initially posed as an obtuse actor excited about crypto, started asking Mashinsky questions about any legal issues Celsius was running into. Mashinsky didn’t own up to anything, in part because he was interrupted by another Celsius rep. But in May 2025 he was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for multiple counts of fraud after it was discovered that the platform was using new customers’ deposits to pay out returns owed to existing ones.
Perhaps the blockbuster moment of the documentary was when McKenzie, via a Twitter DM, landed a conversation with disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. McKenzie, armed with a coffee mug that said “this is the life of a fraud investigator,” probed an anxious Bankman-Fried about the concept of effective altruism, the idea that one very intelligent person should amass as much wealth as they can to give it back to communities. Throughout the whole conversation, Bankman-Fried’s eyes were darting to the mug and his legs were shaking–and eventually he was called away by a handler. (It probably goes without saying that Bankman-Fried is in prison right now for fraud, imploring Trump to give him a pardon.)
It may seem astonishing that the people engaging in such fraud would be so open to interviewing. But McKenzie later interviews a fraud expert who elaborates that fraud is a special kind of crime, in that fraudsters don’t see themselves as deviant. They relentlessly tell themselves and the world stories in order to reconcile themselves as normal members of society.
And it’s true that stories are what the industry survives off of, even more than most. One of the stories that very briefly hooked me back in 2017 came from a person who McKenzie interviewed in the documentary: Human Rights Foundation CEO Alex Gladstein. Gladstein’s pitch to McKenzie in 2022 was similar to what Gladstein and I had spoken about in 2018: that crypto allows for freedom from oppressive governments, the chance for people to move their assets without government interference, and the ability to send money without paying high remittance fees.
Yet the even more powerful story that has hooked most everyday people, including retail investors, is that traditional banks and financial systems are the villains–and that crypto is a path to freedom from the daily grind.
“I just wanted a shot at freedom,” says one man in the documentary who lost money to Celsius. He thought investing in Celsius could allow him to spend more time with his daughter, and despite losing his funds, he remains committed to the idea that bitcoin is safer and could help him do the same.
While McKenzie’s documentary didn’t reveal anything shocking for those who have been following the space, it will be timeless because digital fraudsters will continue their ploys, in different forms, to capitalize on people’s earnest hopes for freedom, or their deepest fears of being a “loser.” Today, crypto is a key part of prediction markets, allowing people to funnel their ill-gotten gains from insider information into anonymous wallets and then to regular cash. Crypto has also become a weapon in the arsenal of romance scammers, who build trust with lonely people online, encourage them to invest in crypto, then take the money and run.
Now, all markets inherently have winners and losers. But regulations give investors some protection from the ebbs and flows. And banks–which crypto exchanges were claiming to be better than–are backed by the government, should there be a bank run. Banks also have anti-money laundering and know-your-customer standards.
The “winners” in the crypto system, McKenzie found, were a few people controlling the buying and selling. And other beneficiaries were those with existing social power, who jumped on the train–from McKenzie’s fellow actor Matt Damon to Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary. Anyone who raked in millions of dollars did so because they were “in” – and knew or were told when to sell their assets at the right time. Meanwhile, the “losers” were sinking in their savings for the promise of freedom, only to lose that money entirely.
Today, perhaps even more so than 2022, economic undercurrents are giving fuel to the fraud. The middle class is eroding, A.I. is threatening to replace jobs, people are lonely, and prices are rising. I liked economics writer Kyla Scanlon’s commentary, in reference to prediction market Polymarket: “confusion and nihilism are products, not symptoms of this regressive world. The people selling ‘agency’ benefit from a world where nobody trusts institutions, because distrust is the market condition that makes their product necessary. The worse things get, the better their pitch works.”
Tapping into people’s desire for freedom and to “fight the man” is an incredibly potent angle, and it’s why crypto has seen such success so far. But now, with A.I., there’s even more uncertainty around people’s careers and earning capabilities. So a #yolo gamble marketing ploy may be even more appealing.
At the same time, with Trump and other powerful leaders amassing crypto fortunes through barely disguised insider trading, it begs the question of what being an underdog in crypto even looks like anymore. Has crypto become the system it was dead-set on fighting?
When fraud is pitched as freedom, and digital platforms allow it to proliferate, we’re in a dangerous place. The reality is that, in life, people will both win and lose at times, and freedom ultimately can’t be a get-rich-quick-scheme. Anyone who tells you otherwise is someone whose wealth, and the purported freedom that comes with it, depends on you always losing. That’s the story we should become more familiar with.
What else we’re paying attention to…
Voters in a 12,000 person Missouri town, unhappy with the city council’s approval of a $6 billion data center, ousted all four incumbent council members running for reelection. Residents were frustrated by the lack of transparency about the project. The people of Calvert, Maryland are doing the same.
Google DeepMind has hired an in-house “philosopher,” who announced that he is “focused on machine consciousness, human-AI relationships, and AGI readiness.”
Ernie’s 66-year-old mother, Celeste, gave up on dating–and now she has an A.I. boyfriend. What does he think about it?
Joaquin Phoenix, Ben Stiller, Kristen Stewart and 1,000-Plus Hollywood Names Oppose Paramount-Warner Deal in Open Letter: ‘Block the Merger’
“Your AI Slop Bores Me”–Millions of people are pretending to be AI chatbots, for fun
Thanks for writing this. Very timely. I saw an IG ad recently for McKenzie’s doc and wanted to find out more and then forgot about it until the algorithm brought me here. It confirms what I’ve thought about crypto but was too lazy to research that it was a scam and eventually only a few people would walk away with all the real money.