Pryor Cashman Partner Jeffrey Alberts, co-head of the firm’s FinTech Group, joined The Roundtable on June 3, 2022, to discuss “Crypto Crime’s Many Masks.”

Jeff spoke with host Rob Nelson and fellow panelists Tracey Hoyos-Lopez and David Nissman about “the expanding universe of crypto crime as adoption gains pace,” including money laundering and other financial malfeasance.

Jeff told the panel:

“Cryptocurrency was originally created as a way to do something called ‘disintermediation.’ The idea was: I want to give you money right now. We do it through the banking system, but this cool new technology’s been created, where I can give you money directly without any intermediary like a bank. 

Now people are frequently wanting to get involved in cryptocurrency, in DeFi, in NFTs. So they take their cryptocurrency tokens and they give them to some other company or some other group.

What’s going to happen is often they’re giving their money to people that they don’t know very well. Sometimes those people aren't registered with any regulators here in the United States. So those people can just take all the cryptocurrency they're being given.

And it’s a standard crime: They run away, they keep the cryptocurrency, and the people that sent them their cryptocurrency are out of are out of luck. You're likely to see fraud in that area increase in the future.”

Learn more about the event and watch a video of the discussion using the link below.