‘Crypto really preys on men’: Why former OC star Ben McKenzie won’t quit his crusade against digital currencies

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The losers are everybody else'A critic of cryptocurrencies, Ben McKenzie spoke before a Senate forum about Donald Trump's dealings with digital assets on July 27, 2026 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesAs an actor best known for his roles on The O.C. and Gotham, Ben McKenzie considers himself a professional liar, a skill that he says makes him good at spotting deception. When a wave of cryptocurrency hype and celebrity-studded commercials arrived in 2021, McKenzie’s radar went up, and he dusted off his undergraduate economics degree and started doing research. His conclusions about the industry were blunt: McKenzie considers crypto a Ponzi scheme, a “generational hallucination” and a “quasi-cult.” He has since become one of America’s most-outspoken critics of crypto and published the book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, with journalist Jacob Silverman in 2023. Now he’s tackling the topic in his directorial debut, a documentary titled Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, which explores the rise and fall of platforms such as FTX and Celsius Network and reveals the machinery behind the hype and speculation used to promote digital currencies to everyday people. The Financial Post spoke with McKenzie about his views on crypto, who’s really making (and losing) money off it and why victims of scams are often still believers. 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Was there a particular moment that galvanized you to become a crypto critic?Canada's best source for investing news, analysis and insight.By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.The next issue of Investor will soon be in your inbox.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againBM: My friend Dave told me I should buy cryptocurrency. Many people have that friend in their lives that they love dearly, but they would never take financial advice from. For me, that’s Dave. I asked him, “Dave, I’m not going to invest, but what is it?” And he really couldn’t describe what it was accurately. I just became fascinated by it. In the movie, we also use the Matt Damon ad (for Crypto.com) as the inciting incident, if you will. I was pretty frustrated by the celebrities selling this stuff. That was the height of the crypto celebrity shilling in 2021. And I just felt like, well, look, maybe I don’t know that much about crypto yet, but these people certainly don’t know anything about it. And it motivated me to look into it a little further. And once I started looking into it, I really couldn’t stop. FP: The documentary explores how crypto emerged because of distrust in the conventional financial system. How does crypto fill that void, and why is it so appealing to some people? BM: The crypto story is relatively straightforward. The regulated financial system sucks, it’s deeply unfair, and it’s often an insiders’ game. The rich tend to get richer, and many people have trouble getting ahead. The Bitcoin people will say the solution to this flawed system is crypto, which they claim is a more democratic, more decentralized form of currency. The story is very appealing because the first part is true. The first part is what I really think should be the takeaway from this whole crypto experience, which is that we need to improve our financial system and make it fairer and more equitable so that people don’t feel like they need to gamble on things like crypto in order to get ahead. But the second part of the crypto story is just not true. In fact, the crypto system is even more unfair and more inequitable than the regulated system. And it’s not decentralized; it’s heavily centralized. The crypto story may be appealing, but the reality is kind of the opposite of what they’re pitching. In terms of why people fall for it, crypto really preys on men. Men like to gamble more than women, on average, and men are better marks for the industry because many men have been taught to not talk about when we lose money. That keeps the losses hidden from view. This advertisement has not loaded yet.This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.There’s actually a term in crypto, DYOR, or “do your own research.” Meaning if you mess up, it’s your fault. No matter what happens, Bitcoin cannot fail. You can only fail Bitcoin. FP: You’ve critiqued crypto as a rigged game of “casino capitalism.” Who are the winners and losers in the crypto casino? BM: The winners are the insiders, the people that issue the currencies and run the exchanges. Of course, there are always people behind these currencies. They hide behind this myth of decentralization, but at the end of the day, these are privately issued monies with people behind them. Those are the primary winners. A few venture capital firms have done very, very well by getting in early on these crypto projects and then selling them to the public only to usually watch the price of the cryptos collapse. The venture capital firms get a ton of money because they bought the cryptos for almost nothing and sold it to regular people, but regular people get hosed. The losers are everybody else. The insiders win and the losers lose big. FP: In the documentary, you spoke with people who lost money when the crypto platform Celsius Network collapsed. They shared heartbreaking stories of the plans and dreams they had for the money they thought they’d make. And yet, several said they still believe in crypto. How do you explain that? BM: There’s a famous sociological paper, When Prophecy Fails, about what happens to members of a cult when the prophecy of the cult leader doesn’t come true. The world is supposed to end today, and it doesn’t end. Do the members of the cult renounce the faith and leave the cult? No, in fact, they double down; it’s more painful to have to deal with the fact that they have been lied to repeatedly. And in the case of crypto, they put so much trust in a fictitious currency. It’s more painful to admit that it was all an illusion, and they are clinging to that belief. Also, many of them have put a lot of their money in terms of the percentage of their net worth into these projects. My experience has been the more they lose, the more they’ve invested in it, the more they have to believe. It’s easier if you’ve just dabbled in crypto and lost a little bit of money, which is most people who have ever invested in crypto. But for the people that are really, really passionate about it, who have put a lot of their time, energy and money into it, when they lose, most of them have to continue believing. Otherwise, it would be even more painful for them. FP: You landed an interview with FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried just a few months before his arrest in December 2022 (Bankman-Fried was convicted of multiple fraud charges in 2023 and sentenced to 25 years in prison). If you could get an interview now, what would you ask him? BM: I did write him a letter, and he didn’t respond. I would try to see if anything has changed in his view of what happened. My understanding from his interviews he has given is that he continues to believe that, and I’m paraphrasing, it was a misunderstanding and he made a mistake, but he didn’t commit horrible crimes and (FTX) wasn’t insolvent, they just didn’t have the money at the time. This belief Sam has that he is not responsible for what happened when his company collapsed and he was arrested and ultimately convicted by a jury is really indicative of the psychology of many fraudsters. They often start out as legitimate businessmen — Bernie Madoff was a legitimate businessman — but at some point, they either make a decision to start cheating, or they make a mistake, and they don’t want to admit that they make a mistake, and then they start cheating to cover up the mistake, and the lie just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Sam is asking for a pardon from (U.S. President Donald Trump), so I think that shows a lot about whether he’s actually willing to accept blame for what he did. I would be fascinated to interview him, but I would also be very surprised if he actually admitted that he had done the things that he was convicted of and took responsibility for them. FP: The world was inundated by celebrity crypto commercials around 2021-2022. How much responsibility should celebrities bear when they promote crypto products to their audiences? BM: I hesitate to say that celebrities should face more repercussions than potentially some fines if they’ve tried to sell specific individual investments. For the most part, celebrities have avoided consequences other than shame. They’ve been shamed and feel embarrassed about it, which is a good thing. That’s a good way of trying to rein in the behaviour in the short term. In the long term, celebrities are not the root cause. They’re just the megaphone that’s needed when the Ponzi scheme reaches the masses. You need the most famous people in the world to sell it. What really needs to happen is we need to rein in the advertising on this stuff. It’s out of control. This stuff is fundamentally zero sum. Someone wins and someone else has to lose. The house is going to win every time. While I’m not opposed to people being able to gamble, there are a lot of social costs that come with it. Crypto, prediction markets and sports betting are gambling on steroids, and it’s a bad combination. I think we need to restrict the advertising so that young men don’t fall victim to it as often. FP: Do you think there are any legitimate use cases for crypto? BM: Money is a tool, right? You can use this grey or black-market money for good. Someone told me a story about a woman running a business in Afghanistan who couldn’t get banking because of the Taliban and women not having equal rights. She was using cryptocurrency to pay her employees. I don’t know if that’s true, but there are scenarios like that I think do exist. And we can all agree that’s a good thing. But if we’re being adults about it, we have to weigh the positives against the negatives. And the scale of the negatives, the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people in the United States and Canada, and probably hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have lost money on cryptocurrency is one cost of it. The other more significant cost in terms of global economic order is criminal activity. The amount of criminal activity is staggering — (US)$154 billion of criminal activity in 2025 alone, according to (blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis’) estimate. Do I think there is US$154 billion of good stuff that’s being facilitated? No, I don’t. And unfortunately, there just aren’t very good hard numbers in crypto by nature. It’s an anonymous blockchain, and so much of the activity really happens outside of the purview of the regulated economy, so it’s hard to get accurate statistics on it. But we do know that the scale of criminal activity is enormous. The question is, is it worth it? Is the small relative amount of good worth the large amount of bad? This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. Everyone Is Lying to You for Money is being streamed online from Aug. 22 to Sept. 6, including a special streaming event on Aug. 22 that will be followed by a live Q&A with McKenzie. 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