Over the past couple of years,
I've been noticing something.
Do you guys feel like scam artists are everywhere?
AUDIENCE: Yes!
Right, you obviously heard about FTX, right?
The cryptocurrency exchange that lost $8 billion
of investor deposits based on the reputation
of this electrocuted nine-year-old?
Yeah.
It was insane.
But you know what was crazier?
The people who helped him do it.
I'm excited to be partnering with FTX to help make crypto
accessible for everyone.
I'm all in.
Are you?
STEPHEN CURRY: With FTX, I have everything I need to buy,
sell, and trade crypto safely.
TOM BRADY: I've been trading crypto.
FTX is the safest and easiest way to buy and sell crypto.
It's the best way to get in the game.
If there's ever a place I could
be that I'm not going to get in trouble,
it's going to be at FTX.
Wow, Kevin!
That prediction age so poorly.
Leonardo DiCaprio just broke up with it.
So obviously, FTX is old news.
But when the new CEO, John Ray, took over the company,
he looked at the books, and he said one
thing that I cannot forget.
He said that he has never seen a group
of such inexperienced, unsophisticated, and
potentially compromised group of individuals.
This dude said that the situation was,
quote, "unprecedented," and he oversaw
the bankruptcy of Enron.
OK?
That's like if your doctor told you
he had the weirdest penis he had ever seen,
and then you found out his other patient
was Rudy Giuliani.
Now, a lot of people have said we are living
in the golden age of grifting.
There's articles everywhere about it.
But it's not the golden age of grifting.
Because that makes it sound smart and sophisticated.
The truth is, the grifters of our age are fucking morons.
Just absolute dipshits, soft-brained Neanderthals.
And that's the part that bothers me so much.
I have friends that I grew up with that
got duped by these clout-chasing sociopaths.
That's why we need to know why it's gotten so stupid--
so we never get back here.
Let's talk about the golden age of dip-shittery
in our latest installment of "Long Story Short."
[cheering, applause]
Do you guys remember the '08 financial crisis?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
Yes, it was so complicated.
Remember The Big Short?
What the hell is a credit default swap?
I have no idea.
Margot Robbie explained it to me, naked in a bathtub,
and I still don't get it.
But the scandals today?
Oh!
They're truly idiotic.
Take Coinbase. OK?
Very legit app.
I have it on my phone.
But it was recently at the center of the first crypto
insider-trading scandal.
Now, you're probably thinking, wow, Hasan, crypto!
It's got to be complicated, right?
Wrong.
According to the DOJ, here's how it worked.
Right before Coinbase listed a new coin,
this dork, who worked at Coinbase,
would text his little brother to tell him to buy that coin.
And at one point, they just texted the dollar-sign
and eyes emoji.
You know, the universal symbol for insider trading--
just zero subtlety.
Now, it gets even dumber.
When Coinbase caught him and tried to bring him in,
Ishan emailed his coworkers that he would be,
quote, "out indefinitely, because he had to fly
back to India overnight."
Ishan, you [bleep] dumbass.
You're fleeing the country.
You don't ping HR on Slack.
Just, uh, hey, Carol?
Um, running from the law, just looping you in.
Um, just bumping this for visibility.
Thanks.
Now, obviously, crypto is full of idiots.
But this dipshit grifting--
oh, it's [bleep] everywhere.
So don't feel bad if you've been duped.
Even JPMorgan got swindled.
Take the case of Charlie Jarvis, OK?
She founded a startup called, Frank,
and she claimed to have a user base
of almost 4 million customers.
And in 2021, JPMorgan bought her company for $175 million.
She was in Forbes.
She was the future!
But now, JPMorgan is suing her, because it looks like those 4
million customers she had?
Oh, she made them up.
Almost all of them were fake!
And do you know how JPMorgan found out they were fake?
After they bought the company--
which is [bleep] stupid--
they emailed the list, and then 70% of the emails
bounced back.
That's right.
[laughter]
The person who blew the lid off this intricate plot
was Mailer-Daemon.
What the [bleep] is going on?
I think there are three factors.
OK?
Number one, millennials have three times less money than
boomers did at the same age.
So we have this feeling, as millennials,
where we want to catch up.
Pay for that marriage, that mortgage.
We feel behind the game.
We've got to catch up fast.
Now, Gen X-- they're behind, too,
but who gives a shit about them?
They have Nirvana.
Number two-- 0% interest rates, plus multiple COVID
stimulus bills, pumped a huge amount of money
into the system.
And the third reason there's more grifts than ever might
be the most important detail.
Social media.
From the moment you wake up and you pull out your phone,
these grifters have root access to your brain.
And it's never been easier for total idiots
to pass themselves off as stock market gurus
to millions of people.
And there is no idiot more total than this guy.
My name is Tommy.
I am from Tel Aviv, Israel.
Now, I live in Beverly Hills, California.
Last year, I turned $3,000 into $4 million.
We used to be broke!
I am a stock trader.
[bleep] MEIP, holy shit.
And I am also the number-61 DJ on the planet.
[dance music]
This is Tommy Cooperman, a.k.a.
the number-61 DJ on the planet.
[laughter]
But he's hoping to drop down to 69, so he can go by DJ Noice.
Tommy and his friends promoting themselves on Twitter
as financial gurus--
follow them, and you could be a baller.
And they amassed huge followings, because they
look really cool, right?
Especially the guy doing this.
[laughter]
[bleep] yeah, dude.
But I want to talk about this guy,
with a photoshopped head of Zack Morris.
Now, in reality, that's Edward Constantine.
Edward loves to go on Twitter and show off his cars,
his shoes, and his scooters.
That's right, ladies.
Scooters.
Edward loves scooters.
He rides them all the time while being really cool.
[laughter]
I can honestly say, I have never prayed
harder for a car door to open.
[laughter]
[cheering, applause]
OK.
The question was, how were these guys getting
so rich from trading stocks?
And the suspicion was, they were
running a pump-and-dump scam.
That's when you buy a stock, you hype it up
to your followers so they buy it, which pushes the price up,
then you secretly sell your stock.
And then, innocent people get left holding the bag.
And you would think they would hide the evidence, right?
Nope.
Eddie would regularly post pictures like this.
Or he would regularly tweet that he
loved pumping and dumping, and then posted a photo of him
and his friend flipping off the SEC.
[bleep] yeah, bruh.
And it went on like that until the SEC said, um, no.
[bleep] you.
New this morning-- an alleged 114-million-dollar
fraud scheme involving self-proclaimed
stock market influencers.
The SEC and DOJ are charging eight
social media influencers in the so-called pump-and-dump plan.
REPORTER: Prosecutors have a secretly recorded voice
chat where the influencers even brag about the alleged scheme,
saying, quote, "we're robbing [bleep]
idiots of their money."
Oh, my god.
These mouth-breathing morons snitched on themselves.
Oh, [bleep], no, bro!
Now, I got to give props to the SEC.
They're clearly starting to send a signal to all grifters
that it's 2023, and the party's over.
Last year, the SEC collected a record $6.4 billion
in penalties, with no sign of slowing down.
Now, who knows if these guys are going to go to jail.
But the SEC is making an example out of them,
and it's working.
After the SEC charged them, all of them
stopped tweeting, or deleted their accounts.
Although scooter douche Edward Constantine left us with one
epic final tweet.
"I love my homies on here.
The rest of you can keep swinging on my nuts."
[laughter]
OK.
I have to admit, that is kind of funny.
Just swinging on the-- you know, it's funny!
It's funny, it's funny.
But one of the top responses to that tweet is not funny.
And it reminds me of the people that I
know that also got duped.
One of the top responses--
this dude writes, "Shame on me.
I used to defend these guys, thinking that they were going
to help me pay off my wife's medical bills after
her fighting breast cancer.
I know I'm the one that clicked the buy button,
but damn, I lost a ton of money following their trades."
This is the true damage of the grift.
This is why there needs to be consequences.
And the good news is, there can be.
If you think someone is running a scam on Twitter or TikTok,
be a snitch.
Yes!
Hasan Minhaj is saying, snitch!
I am pro-snitching!
The SEC has a website to submit tips anonymously.
You can go to this website and snitch on dipshit grifters.
So long story short, start calling
these mother-[bleep] out.
Drop kick them with cold, hard consequences!
[cheering, applause]
Because if you're not, in the words of the great scooter
philosopher, I don't know what the [bleep]
you're doing with your life.