The Dirty Truth about Crypto Influencers — The Real Scammers!
Welcome to my poorly written hit piece on the hidden scam of Crypto coaches, trading educators and the worst of them all.. YouTube and TikTok Crypto shills! No doubt I’ll rustle a couple feathers here but.. F**k it.
DISCLAIMER — The reason for this article is to raise awareness on how these people and systems operate so in the future you can try look at what is being posted in a more cynical way, that way you can question what someones motivation is on why they decide to post and shill certain projects and coins. Hopefully this helps identity whether these people are scammers or actually providing a legitimate service — the line on this can be very blurry. This is my personal opinion and while that opinion is quite low on the majority of these ‘influencers’, some do offer excellent free and paid content and while I have a seething hate for the majority of these YouTube and TikTok shills, there is no denying that money can be made off their horrible paid click-bait videos!
So…!
Its mid October 2021, Bitcoin is on the verge of breaking a new all time high. In fact, there’s probably a strong chance that will have already happened by the time I decide to publish this rant. It’s been awhile since publishing anything and there’s a high probability this will get buried with all the other half finished guides and publications I’ve yet to complete!
Yes, we are in a raging crazy bull market that has seen a new generation of investors. Investors who seem to be engrossed in the culture of get rich quick schemes, meme coins and hype coins being pumped and dumped off social media and video sharing platforms. But with this surge of new savvy bag holders comes a vast wave of gutter trash looking to cash in on the hype and exploit the new money flowing into this market.
Its time people stop looking at these Influencers like they are Crypto geniuses and see them for what they really are! So here’s the TRUTH, that these people are the more savvy hidden scammers of the Crypto world! Do with this information what you will but I’ll start with what I consider the LEAST scummy and work my way down the list!
TRADING EDUCATORS
Jeeze I’ve seen some absolute shockers lately!
‘See how I turned 10k into 60k this year by buying and selling Cryptocurrency’
‘I was a construction labourer and now I’m a full time trader JOIN my course to find out how!’
‘Do my course and become a Crypto millionaire!’
‘Sign up to my webinar and learn how to become financially free in weeks!’
Now please understand, I am actually a big advocate of people maturing in the market and educating themselves through T.A. (Technical Analysis) but the simple fact is that a lot of these trading educators aren’t successful traders, they make their money in a few ways but my best guess is the vast majority make more off their courses, referrals and commissions then they have ever made trading. On the flip-side, at least you will learn something you can use and maybe even make some money once you have spent time in the market. But be warned, half the courses out there are from people who have only just finished doing courses themselves!
The blueprint for becoming a trading educator and selling courses is stupidly easy and i’m going to tell you exactly how they do it.
Step 1 — Build up a profile by posting the odd basic educational T.A. on Facebook.
Step 2 — Create a Facebook Page and funnel interested newbies to your page.
Step 3 — Post winning trades only, delete any you were wrong.
Step 4 — Post trade idea’s (probably stolen from elsewhere) with a bullish and bearish scenario that way you are never wrong.
Step 5 — Push your referral links to exchanges and other paying platforms within your group (passive income stream).
Step 6 — Sell your product — Trading courses (Once off income) with basic info found in most free or paid courses.
Step 7 — Sell your premium service & subscription of daily market scans or a private premium signals group.
step 8 — If they have made it this far with a big enough following, they are probably taking advantage of their members. How you ask? Most likely by finding low liquidity coins at technical levels, putting a trade on, posting to their premium group, then their Facebook group and then to various other groups. They just pumped and dumped a coin on their followers and they will look at them like god status because ‘WOW, that coin pumped!’ and ‘He was right!’.
Unfortunately this is generally the business model for all trading content which can make it hard figuring out the crap from the good. Best advice would be to hunt around and do your research (or read my Beginner’s Guide), find content creators that have good reputations throughout the space and look for some courses that have been around for awhile — have stood the test of time. They do exist and some of them are bloody excellent and well worth a monetary investment.
Also another tell tale sign they may just be legit is when they aren’t afraid of their losing trades and don’t delete their posts when trades go the other way — the reason this is a really important aspect is because their risk management should have stopped them losing money when the trade went the other way. If they are not afraid of being wrong they are probably making enough money not to care — definitely should give you confidence that they are in fact a proper trader.
On another positive note, there is a lot of good trading content that can be found for free if you have the time to search for it. Its generally the same content that gets posted in the vast majority of paid courses just less refined. Do yourself a favour and watch multiple sources to see what I mean.
CRYPTO COACHES
Now this is a bit of a newer category that I’ve seen posted about a lot more this bull run. To be honest, there’s not all that much difference from those selling trading courses except these guys offer a more broad service and usually for a lot more, they market themselves as a ‘one stop shop’ for lazy or time poor investors — Technical Analysis and Fundamental Analysis experts who do all the heavy lifting for you! The blueprint/template is almost the same. Not unknown for people to be paying $50–$100 per week if not vastly more on the monthly scale. That’s a good sum per customer, especially if they can capture you for any decent amount of time!
Some even charge hundreds of dollars per hour!
But here’s the kicker — Essentially all they do is use your subscription money to buy into more premium groups and services like the Delphi Report or Glassnode subscription ect. Re-package the info in the analysis, data and reports as their own and pass onto their own subscribers. On top of that, follow the popular YouTube influencers (to be covered soon) and mirror what the big shillers shill — hint — there’s usually a price pump!
Can these ‘Cryptocurrency coaches’ have value? Yes. But you will be paying a huge premium for none original content that someone else far smarter has created— even tho expensive upfront — you could most likely pay for those premium subscriptions yourself for cheaper than your crypto coach will end up costing you. Why use a middle man when you can go direct to the source!?
This ‘coaching’ market exists because people unfortunately tend to be lazy, hear all these stories of people getting rich quick and search for a quick fix solution from some advertisement campaign they stumbled onto when watching YouTube videos or scrolling through Facebook but all that ends up happening is they end up paying the bills for a snake oil salesman expert.
INFLUENCERS
Ahhhhh where to even begin!? Now these guys are the real bane of the crypto world.
It legitimately blows my mind that the new aged crypto investor considers platforms like TikTok and YouTube as sources of ‘research’.
Everybody knows that people with large followings on platforms like Instagram make huge dollars advertising products. It’s an extremely lucrative business tho highly competitive. It really is the modern way of advertising. This is well known and well documented but when it comes to these crypto Influencers, they seem to get a free pass! Look, its a competitive market so you do need to give some of these guys props for making it! Many of them probably started off with good intentions, others and most likely the vast majority have seen it as a way to leach off people.
So how do these guys make money?
Well it should come as no surprise that any content creator gets paid based on traffic, subscribers and their YouTube premium.
While YouTube isn’t directly paying you for your video content, the platform is still monetised. This — as mentioned above — is done by a few methods.
- Advertisement revenue share — The more traffic, the higher the likes and the bigger your subscribed followers — the more likely you will get paid in advertising royalties. There is a bit more to this but this is just a simplified version.
- Premium subscriptions — quite simply you pay to watch their content so you can watch their content without getting interrupted by advertising.
- Selling merchandise — no explanation needed for this. Using their channel to sell merch like hats and shirts ect.
So they pump out regular videos, have ‘click bait’ titles to catch viewers attention (and clicks) and share links across multiple platforms.
While these are the legitimate way content creators make money, make no mistake there’s a dark underbelly where earning potential is hugely increased and very easily hidden.
Welcome to crypto’s largest pump and dump money scheme — The crypto ‘Influencer’
If they have started to ‘make it’ in this content sharing industry then inevitability they end up here..
Crypto projects — just like products seeking popular Instafamous stars — find these ‘higher tier’ Crypto Influencers and PAY THEM either in dollars or cryptocurrencies to shill their project.
These Influencers then promote these projects as ‘the next big thing’ or ‘hidden gem’ OR ‘next 1000x gain”
Make no mistake they are PAID for this.
They haven’t ‘discovered’ this project, they have been PAID to mention these projects and these projects can range from small low caps to huge high cap projects.
The more savvy influencers will take this a step further and take positions in these coins/tokens prior to releasing the content.
I know what you are thinking — isn’t that illegal? — well yes of course it is but just like insider trading, it happens regularly and crypto is really easy to hide these ‘practices’.
So lets break this down this process.
- Projects contact these crypto influencers and pay them to ‘shill’ their project
- The influencer may take positions in these coins/tokens
- The influencer then releases the content to their community members — inevitably this begins the buying pressure and is the start of the pump process
- Content is released for the general public — this is where the liquidity will start to mostly flow in from
- Other content creators trying to break into the higher tiers release their own ‘copy videos’ in order to piggy back off the Influencers pump
- As the hype builds, it spreads to Facebook and various other platforms where the masses start to shill but they are late to the game and are buying into the top of the pump
- The Influencer has no doubt already sold his holdings throughout this pump and made a solid sums of dollars from the initial shill payments and the sneaky positions bought and sold
- When the hype is big enough, the project or project whales then dump their coins/tokens on all the fresh liquidity joining the pump
- If the price starts to tank, the more experienced people no that the run is done and dusted, they sell out leaving the late comers holding the bags of useless coins/tokens
- The influencer — if they haven’t already — moves onto the next in a rinse and repeat cycle
The crazy part of this giant pump and dump scheme is that the Influencer is almost praised instead of vilified because ‘they were right’ and the project did have a large price increase. More people take notice and their following gets even bigger in a completely vicious cycle.
The only things that can break these cycles are awareness on how this system operates and a good old fashioned bear market to kill off these leaches. Some will already be too big to fail but perhaps the next wave of snake oil salesmen will fail to make an impact.
Now, there’s obviously an opportunity for the savvy investor to make money off the hype these pump and dump schemes generate but keep in mind, if this is how you want to play the market —not only are you contributing to this cycle but you are playing a dangerous game akin to musical chairs but in this game — when the music stops you DON’T want to he left holding the bags of useless sh*tcoins.
Not all of these guys have sold out, there are plenty of legitimate Influencers and businesses that offer above mentioned services and even those that have sold out probably post the odd piece of good information. Many of their earlier videos while they were trying to build an audience were/are probably half decent.
There can still be value found even from the sell outs but please take anything ANYONE says on these platforms like YouTube and TikTok with a grain of salt. Learn to digest the good from the bad and most of this skill will only come with time in the market.
If you found this helpful, feel free to check out my FREE article on medium — A Beginner’s guide for Australian based investors— link below! And good luck and stay safe!
