Jordan Belfort, the man who pleaded guilty to fraud for the pump and dump schemes which may have cost his investors as much as $200 million back in his heydays on Wall Street (and served 22 months in prison for his troubles), reckons “sh*tcoin” creators should be jailed.
Belfort, who is known as The Wolf Of Wall Street, and who was played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2014 movie Wolf Of Wall Street, is now a motivational speaker and author, who talks openly about the mistakes he made in that time of his life.
He is also a proponent of shining light on dark places, and regulating them, which he says eventually makes them better and bigger markets.
This brings us to his (in some people’s view) recent, hypocritical claim. Though you could argue he has now turned over a new leaf and so it is not hypocritical at all, it could also be said: “you can’t bullsh*t a bullsh*tter” (or someone that used to be a bullsh*tter).
In any case, Belfort’s recent comments about crypto pump and dumps certainly sound a bit ironic, if not hypocritical. Unfortunately for many meme coin advocates, they also sound quite accurate and sensible.
Belfort recently spoke to The Sun Online and told them cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu “have no value and no use.”
This comes somewhat in contradiction to claims Elon Musk and Mark Cuban have made regarding Dogecoin’s potential uses.
Watch Elon Musk and Mark Cuban discuss potential real-world applications for Dogecoin
Belfort told The Sun Online he was a fan of the blockchain – the technology which underpins many cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and makes them almost impossible to hack.
But he cautioned people against putting large sums of cash into “meme coins” – meme coins being digital currencies created as jokes or self-aware (or in some people’s cases not self-aware) pyramid schemes and which have made some people very rich, and lost other people a lot of money.
Notably, the recent Squid Game token, turned out to be a scam, with the developers profiting off the name of a trending Netflix series then disappearing with investors money, with bugs in the system stopping people from cashing out when they realised something was fishy.
Belfort warned that some the newer meme coins are full-on fugazis (in an ironically similar fashion to how Hollywood described Wall Street stocks in the movie named after him: “It’s a wazi, it’s a woozi”).
He told The Sun Online: “I’m a fan of blockchain but there’s a lot of nonsense out there, a lot of s**t coins which serve no purpose and are only there to separate people from their money.”
DMARGE found this out the hard way in a recent crypto experiment, when we got rug pulled hard.
“You hear crazy stories of people making millions and billions but for every person like that there are 10,000 or a 100,000 people getting their a** handed to them in Shiba Inu,” Belfort told The Sun Online.
“It’s not a proper investment. People are taking advantage of an unregulated market and creating s**t coins which have no value and have no use.”
He added: “unscrupulous people start the coins and get into a chat room and saying stuff that’s blatantly illegal.”
“People should go to jail seriously – they are not legitimate. There is no way they are ever going to work.”
“My guess is that someone will end up getting indicted for this stuff. The wheels of justice grind slowly but they do grind forward, despite no one getting in trouble yet I have to believe the government is looking at this and saying ‘wait a second, there’s all these people scamming.’ What I hate about it the most is that legitimate stuff – it gives those digital coins a bad name.”
“The sooner governments step in the better it is for crypto because when authorities start to regulate a dark market, it gets bigger and better.”