Did I Get Scammed by a Crypto Bro - PART ONE
help me decide
His name was Bijan, and he had the nicest smile I’ve ever seen. He would come in my restaurant on Thursdays for dollar oysters.
I liked to tell guests that our oysters were Blue Point, and imported from Long Island that very morning.
Bijan, meanwhile, was imported from the Financial District, where he lived and worked. It was a world away from me, who worked in the Lower East Side and lived in Bushwick. I simply did not encounter Fi-Guys in my universe. I knew about them only from memes about Patagonia vests and Murray Hill addresses.
Yet here was a Fi-Guy, making friends with me at my restaurant. He was often perseverating over his phone, but when I would drift over, he would raise his head and flash his glorious smile. He told me about his Swedish girlfriend (she will be offstage for this entire essay) and his work. When I asked what he did, he answered cryptically, “Crypto.” There are a lot of memes cracking on crypto bros too, but I chose not to weave them into conversation.
The second or third time he came in was when he started to recruit me. He said he was impressed with how I remembered his order (Old Fashioned with Bulleit, and two dozen oysters), plus other details about his life (but who forgets an inamorata from Stockholm?)
“Have you ever thought about financial sales?” he asked me.
I told him he had the wrong gal. “I’m terrible with numbers. Plus, don’t you need an MBA for that?”
“There are different aspects to the industry,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s about relationships.”
Then he got my number, saying we could discuss it over Happy Hour tomorrow.
I’ll admit I was intrigued. In the World of Work, I had always made my money two ways: restaurants or rentals. Since moving back to NYC, I had fallen back on Brooklyn rentals, even if it had proven to be a lumpy crash-pad. It was commission-only work, and a great many deals fell through. Reasons spanned from the applicant having a 662 credit score, or backing out after finding a bedbug report on Igloo.com. The reasons all sucked equally; each one a small miscarriage.
I made no secrets about my disillusionment with the job. I had already maxed out my friend’s sympathy, and their suggestions. They knew I was a writer, so they would say cute but obvious things like, “why don’t you write copy for a tech company?”
To me, this was like suggesting that Sofia Coppola pivot to Hallmark movies. I had my own words to siphon into being, thank you very much. What would the world do without my philosophy—fall back on nana’s proverbs??
Basically, I just wanted to lease out my body for 25-30 hours weekly, in exchange for $1100/week. Any more time or less money would threaten the hedonistic coastline of friends and fun I’d built for myself.
As it turned out, what Bijan was offering me was farrrr greater than $1100/week.
The next day, we met for drinks at Hair of the Dog, a sports bar in the Lower East Side.
There, he explained his business to me: he sold crypto-backed loans worth up to $100 million.
“And we get 2% of the sale,” he said calmly, pulling out his calculator. He showed me what the commission would be on such a sale.
“Wow,” I breathed, fogging up the screen filled with zeroes. I told him my last commission had been $500 for a room at 862 Hart.
He flashed his dazzling, Disney Prince smile.
“You’re in for a treat.”
Then, he took me through the finer points of his process. This is where I’m hoping that the one Fi-Guy who’s reading this could tell me how legitimate or not is sounds: the loans were generated by East Asian banks. They don’t check your finances, just your Bitcoin wallet. Assuming you have at least $1 million in there, you were eligible for a loan. The interest rates were super low (only 2%!). Those were basically service fees which we used to pay ourselves, as the brokers.
I was coming to him from the world of real estate, where getting a mortgage required careful scrutiny of one’s income. Bank statements, pay stubs, and credit scores were all combed over so the bank could make sure that only 28% of your income was going to the mortgage.
How was this possible? I still couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Understanding crypto was like trying to follow along with what the kitchen boys were yapping about in Spanish.
Bijan assured me that it wasn’t that serious. He quoted Matthew McConaughey in Wolf of Wall Street: “Crypto, it’s a fugazzy, it’s a woozy, it’s a fuzzy, it’s all fairy dust, babe.” Then he hit his vape, and asked if we could recreate the business card scene from American Psycho (that’s only half true).
His Swedish girlfriend was on my mind, even though he wasn’t mentioning her much. He invited me to meet up with some of his friends from Europe who were in town.
“Juni is sick, poor thing,” he cooed. “She can’t make it.”
I hesitated, then politely declined. I did not want to keep drinking. Plus, I had the dawning sense that boundaries wouldn’t exist here unless I drew them. (For instance, whenever I would text him a question, he would say, “but what are you doing right now?”) Bijan wouldn’t cross any lines, but he would take his brush and make them into watercolors.
When we left, he pointed to an Asian spa on the corner, saying he could use a massage. Somehow, happy endings came up, and he said he wasn’t above them.
“It’s not cheating. Juni and I are open.”
“Oh,” I said. Oh, I thought. It wasn’t his fault, but through the biases of my mind, it was almost like someone had glazed him in oil.
“This is a big week for crypto,” he said. “There is a big conference in town. You’ll be my date.”
Permissionless was the name of the conference. It was held in Sunset Park, an hour away on the train for me. When I looked it up, it said the focus was “shifting infrastructure to applications in crypto” (k!—lol).
It was $1000/ticket, and Bijan hadn’t bought them (I thought this was funny, given how it was allegedly only 1/50th of his last commission…). He knew how to get into the side events though. In my fleeting foray into this world, I would learn that the, “side events” were the fun part. In the main event, you had to sit on fold-out chairs and listen to a bunch of panelists talk about OneChain Applications and Parallelization. But at side events, there was often an open bar, a buffet, and plenty of opportunity to mix and mingle.
The first side event was at a bowling alley. Immediately, I was shaking hands with crypto kings and queens from all over the country: Lake Tahoe, Miami, San Diego, San Francisco.
“What do you do in this space?” they all asked.
So far, the only thing I’d done in this space was drink free wine and look agog. So I told them I was under Bihan’s tutelage; virgin snow; green as the hills of my homeland. Bijan said it was good to be earnest like that. Then I watch him work his magic on the crypto kings and queens. He was trying to sell them his services.
They pummeled him with rapid-fire questions, using verbs and adjectives I’d never encountered in any book. (“Are the loans collateralized? How are they hypothecated?”) Bijan answered each of them with ease and elegance. He was Sean Connery in his prime, and these people were his Bond girls. One by one, he won them over. They pulled out their phones and chirped, “let’s connect!”, scanning the QR codes to get to each other’s LinkedIns. This was the equivalent of millennial girls following each other on IG in the bathroom line.
I was wowed by Bijan myself. I allowed myself to wonder in earnest, could this man really change my life? I kept getting flashes of the pilot episode of Shameless, when Steve invites Fiona to step out of the squalor of her life, and go joy riding in his stolen car.
Could he be the Steve to my Fiona?