Novi, a digital wallet for cryptocurrency that Meta debuted in 2021, is on its last legs. Per the Novi website, users have until Sept. 1 to get their info and their remaining crypto balance off the site. As CNBC pointed out, this snuffs out the final, tiny flickering flame from Meta’s crypto efforts over the last few years.

Put simply, Novi was supposed to be a safe way for people to send and receive crypto, and at one point it was supposed to work with Diem, the Facebook-backed cryptocurrency that started life as Libra in 2019 before getting rebranded later. That never actually happened because, in February of this year, Diem collapsed.

Without even the ability to issue the currency made by its own parent company, Novi didn’t stand a chance. The site never even exited beta into a full 1.0 version. However bullish Mark Zuckerberg and co. may have been (and may still be, privately) about crypto, it seems the idea of decentralized blockchain currency doesn’t have a home within Meta’s corporate walls anymore.

In case you’ve been under a rock, crypto has been crashing hard in 2022. It’s not the first time this has happened, but even crypto news site Coindesk has admitted that this time feels different. A complex combination of COVID, war, inflation, and everything else seems to have made it much harder for the digital dollar dream to sustain itself right now.

With respect to those who have lost their livelihoods due to the current landscape…maybe this is ultimately for the best.

The scam was pretty sneaky: A friend messaged Giordano (who, full disclosure, is a friend of mine) on Instagram asking if she could help her win a contest. The friend would send her a text with a link, and all Giordano had to do was take a screenshot of the text and send it back to her friend. Giordano did as instructed. Moments later, she got an email from Instagram saying someone logged into her account from a different location on a different device.

A screenshot that causes your account to be hacked sounds like a lower-stakes but higher-tech version of The Ring, but what happened to Giordano is actually quite simple. There was no contest, and the text didn’t come from her friend. Giordano’s friend (or, almost certainly, someone who took over her friend’s account and was pretending to be her friend) went to Instagram’s password reset page and requested a reset link for Giordano’s account. That prompted Instagram to send a text to Giordano with a link to access her Instagram account. The URL of the link was in the text, so when Giordano took the screenshot and sent it back, the scammer simply entered the URL in their device, and that let them access Giordano’s account — no password or supernatural curses necessary.

Fortunately for Giordano, she saw Instagram’s email almost immediately and was able to get back into her account before the scammer took it over. She blocked her friend’s account, changed her password, and enabled two-factor authentication.

“I was just very naive and trusting,” Giordano tells me. “I felt pretty stupid when all was said and done.”

She shouldn’t have. The Instagram messages came from what appeared to be a friend, and Giordano’s other friends have asked for her help with (real) social media-based contests in the past, so of course she didn’t think much of it. She certainly didn’t think sending a screenshot could compromise her account. Until we spoke, she didn’t even know how it happened — it took me a while to figure it out too, until this tweet warning about this kind of scam clarified things. If Giordano hadn’t seen that email from Instagram, her account might have been lost to her forever, probably going on to try to scam all of her friends.

We’d like to think that scams happen to other people who aren’t as smart or savvy as we are. Many people who get scammed believe this, which is why the vast majority of them will never report it: Either they don’t know they were scammed or they’re ashamed to admit that it happened to them.

But it could happen to anyone, including you.

“The reason why these scams work is because some of them are good,” Yael Grauer, content lead for Consumer Reports’ Security Planner, tells Vox. “Even though I think education is important, there’s a reason social engineering is a thing. You can’t be perfect and on guard all the time.”

Scammers prey on our biggest fears and strongest desires. They get better all the time, so it’s worth your time to learn how to recognize their tactics. The mediums scammers use may change, but many of the underlying strategies stay the same — which means the recommendations for how to protect yourself from them do too.

Don’t panic …

When I got an email saying there was a new login to my Twitter account from Moscow, my initial response was abject terror (My checkmark! My DMs! My reputation!). At first glance, the email looked a lot like the login confirmation emails that Twitter actually sends. Even the email address it was sent from was very close to the one Twitter uses for such notifications. I admit that I almost clicked on the account restoration link. Then the adrenaline wore off, and I realized that the email came from “twitter-act.com” and not “twitter.com.” It was sent to my work email, which isn’t attached to my Twitter account, and it had a typo. Most importantly, I remembered that some of my co-workers had gotten similar phishing emails only a few days before. I actually knew to expect this one, but all of that fell out of my head for a few seconds — which was exactly the point.

“It’s really, really hard for us to access logical thinking when we’re in a heightened emotional state, and it’s so hard to get out of that state once you’ve engaged,” says Kathy Stokes, director of fraud prevention at the AARP. “If you feel an immediate sort of visceral, emotional reaction to something coming your way, try to let that be your red flag.”

Scammers know that emotions make their job easier. People get careless or let their guard down, which is why so many scams start with urgent messages asking you to do something immediately: dispute an erroneous charge on your Amazon account, fix your hacked social media account, avoid being arrested by the IRS police by settling a bill that for some reason can only be paid off in gift cards. In almost every case, a legitimate message doesn’t need you to respond within the next 30 seconds. So take that 30 seconds to calm down and think before you click anything.

… and don’t engage

If you get a message or call you weren’t expecting and don’t know, the best thing to do is ignore it. Even what appears to be a perfectly innocent wrong number text could be something more insidious: someone trying to scam you by starting up a conversation. I’ve gotten a few of those wrong number texts, and while I’d like to think they kept texting me back because of my sparkling wit and impeccable conversation skills, that almost certainly wasn’t the reason.

“Someone texts something important enough for you to tell them it’s a wrong number and suddenly they’re like, ‘You sound like a great person,’” Grauer says. “For the most part, it’s almost always a scam.”

Find your meet-cute somewhere else.

That’s especially true for the texts and calls you know are scams. You may think it’ll be cathartic to respond to those by cursing out the people who are trying to steal your money, but the best thing you can do is block the number and move on with your life. Engaging with a scammer tells them your phone number or email address has a real person on the other end of it, which will only set you up to get more texts and calls and emails.

“The basic rule of thumb is simply hang up, and call whatever enterprise you think called you directly,” Alex Quilici, CEO of robocall-blocking software company YouMail, explains. For example, if your “bank” calls, you should hang up, find the number of your bank on your debit card (or another official source, like its website), and call that number back. “That’s the 100 percent safe way to deal with the issue.”

Even better is stopping scam calls and texts from reaching you at all. Phone companies now offer free spam-blocking services, which can identify and stop potential scam or spam calls. Some services can block potential spam texts: iOS devices have built-in text filters, and Google’s Messages app can warn you if a text seems suspicious.

Don’t give out your password

This should be obvious by now, right? Clearly not, since it’s believed that 90 percent of cyberattacks are the result of successful phishing schemes, where a hacker or scammer tricks victims into thinking they’re a trusted or known source to give their sensitive information to. Some are better than others. I’ve seen some knowledgeable people in my own life fall for email-from-your-employer attacks (they clicked the links, but I hope they all stopped short of giving out their passwords).

That’s why most businesses will tell you that they will never ask for your password, and authentication texts will usually say something like “[Company] will never ask you for this code.” Also, you should really stop using two-factor authentication with texts, which are much less secure — use an authenticator app instead. Google makes a popular one for both iOS and Android.

Scammers love to use social media to find victims, too. If you’ve ever so much as tweeted the word “hack,” you’ll get a series of what I like to call Twitter Scam Reply Guys, who will usually recommend that you contact someone they claim to know who can get your account back, as long as you give them your login credentials and/or pay them (don’t do this).

Know where links are taking you

A common way people get hacked or scammed is through malicious links, often in their email, texts, or DMs. Always check where a link is taking you before you click on it, and only go to websites you trust. That’s easier said than done, of course; it can be hard to see where a link is directing you on a smaller mobile device, and shortened link services may make it impossible to know where you’ll end up. If you get a text from FedEx about a package delivery with a link, for example, you may not realize that the website it’s sending you to isn’t FedEx.

The best thing to do is go to a company’s website directly, rather than through a random link in a text you weren’t expecting in the first place. If you get a text that claims to be FedEx or Wells Fargo, go to FedEx.com or WellsFargo.com; don’t click the link on the text. And definitely don’t enter any of your sensitive information — like your credit card, social security number, or your password — on a site if you aren’t absolutely sure that it’s the site you think it is.

Be very careful with payment apps

Overpayment scams — when someone sends you more money than you were expecting and then asks you to give them back the difference — have stood the test of time. Once it was paper checks and wire transfers. Payment apps have made it even easier.

In fact, peer-to-peer payment apps like Venmo, Zelle, and Cash App have made a lot of scams easier because it’s fairly seamless to send money through them, and those transfers are instantaneous. There’s a reason why those apps tell you over and over again to be sure that the person you’re sending money to is who you think they are: Once your money is sent, you often can’t get it back. These services don’t have the same protections as, say, a credit card or, in some cases, PayPal.

One example of how scammers exploit these apps (and human decency) is to send money to random accounts (like yours), then claim they sent it to the wrong person and ask you to please send the money back. Being nice, you send the money back, only to later discover that the money that was sent to you came from a stolen credit card. Now you have to pay it back — all of it.

If you’re the recipient of extra or unexpected funds, don’t just send the money back to wherever it came from, even if the sender gives you a convincing sob story for why you should. The best thing to do is contact the payment app and deal with the matter through them, rather than directly with whoever sent you the money.

There are ways to protect yourself to a certain extent on these apps. Most will give you a way to verify that you’re sending money to the right person by confirming their email address or phone number first. Use these safeguards. Consumer Reports suggests connecting your peer-to-peer payment apps to a credit card instead of a bank account, as credit cards have more protections for fraudulent transactions. If the app won’t protect you, your credit card company might, though most payment apps make you pay a 3 percent fee on credit card transactions.

It’s also a good idea to put a PIN code on those apps, so even if someone gets into your phone — say, if they ask to borrow it to make an emergency call — they can’t get into your apps and send your money away. This will add an extra step to using your payment app, but an easily remembered four-digit PIN takes about a second to enter and could save you a lot of money.

Don’t use crypto

Even in the best of circumstances, crypto is a loosely (or barely) regulated market that’s as volatile as it is hard to understand. That has helped make it a prime target for scammers and hackers. The decentralized aspect of crypto may be part of its appeal, but it’s a lot less appealing when you check your wallet one day and discover all your apes are gone. Maybe you’ll get lucky and OpenSea will freeze trading of your stolen NFT in time, or Coinbase will reimburse you if your crypto was stolen through its own security flaw. But don’t count on it.

“The advice I give people is that if you don’t understand how it works, don’t get involved in it,” Sean Gallagher, a senior threat researcher at Sophos, says. “Considering that many people who consider themselves educated about crypto still manage to get scammed, it’s probably not a good idea for most people to get into cryptocurrency investing.”

While crypto is relatively new, many people are getting scammed through some of the oldest tricks in the book. Stokes, of the AARP, says she has seen “a ton” of scams where someone gains a victim’s trust and claims they can help invest their money in crypto for a big return. The Federal Trade Commission recently reported that consumers lost $1 billion to crypto-based fraud between January 2021 and March 2022, with most of those losses coming from bogus investment scams — and most of those came from social media posts or ads. And those are just the losses people told the FTC about; again, most people don’t report being defrauded. These days, it’s easy enough to lose money in “legitimate” crypto investments. Why make it even riskier?

Protect yourself from yourself

One way to avoid getting scammed is to preemptively protect your accounts from your mistakes as much as possible. If Giordano had two-factor authentication on her Instagram account, the scammers wouldn’t have been able to get into it through the URL — they’d need the code from her authenticator, too.

There are a few ways you can protect your accounts from getting hacked, including setting up two-factor authentication and using different passwords for everything via a password manager. You can lock things down even more by using hardware authenticators and anti-malware software, which you can get for mobile devices too.

“That’s what security software is supposed to do,” Mark Ostrowski, head of engineering at cybersecurity company Check Point, says. It should protect you from “a lapse in judgment or if the scam is really, really, really, really good.”

At a certain point, your security measures might feel like more trouble than they’re worth. I have to admit, things were easier when I didn’t have to juggle my password manager, two different authenticator apps, and text messages for the accounts where authenticator apps aren’t available. But I’d rather have to take an extra step to log into an account than go through getting hacked and (temporarily) losing $13,000, like I did that time hackers got into my bank account. You never know who has your password or how they got it.

“There’s an ongoing usability versus security thing where it’s not fun, it’s time-consuming, it’s annoying,” Grauer, of Consumer Reports, says.

It’s up to you to decide where the balance between usability and security should be, keeping in mind what you would lose if someone took over your accounts. After that, all you can do is try to keep these tips in mind, hope for the best, and don’t be too hard on yourself if you fall victim to the worst.

“Having a healthy paranoia, I think, is important,” Ostrowski says, before confessing that even he has slipped up and clicked on a few links he shouldn’t have. “I hate to admit it, but I think everybody has, right?”

Although the companies that people use to buy and store crypto are in some ways similar to banks, these platforms don’t have the deposit insurance that bank or investment accounts have. If the companies that operate these platforms were to fail, there’s no guarantee that people would be able to recover the value of their crypto. This lack of protection reflects the fact that regulators are still catching up to the crypto industry. It also serves as a reminder that while crypto platforms might seem secure — some are publicly traded companies — they’re operating in an industry that has almost no rules and few safety nets. Even UST, a “stablecoin” cryptocurrency that’s supposed to track the value of the United States dollar, crashed last month, eviscerating the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars.

“My sleep was severely disturbed, I lost 4 kilograms of weight in a few days, I was in an extremely depressed state,” Yuri Popovich, a Kyiv-based web designer who transferred his family’s savings into UST amid the war in Ukraine, told Recode. “Unfortunately, in our country there is no legislation covering such types of losses.”

While investing in crypto remains incredibly risky around the world for many reasons, regular US bank accounts enjoy some protection offered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Founded during the Great Depression to boost trust in the financial system, the FDIC is designed to guarantee that account holders will recover at least some of their money in the event of a bank’s collapse. Banks fund the FDIC, which, in turn, insures bank accounts up to $250,000.

Since crypto platforms aren’t technically banks and don’t pay into the FDIC system, individual crypto accounts don’t have this form of protection. Meanwhile, crypto investment accounts aren’t generally backed by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, which insures accounts that are managed by brokerage firms, like Fidelity or Vanguard, up to $500,000 if the firm fails.

“Most people are buying cryptocurrency to speculate, right? They think of it as an investable asset,” said Lee Reiners, the executive director of Duke Law School’s Global Financial Market Center. “If you buy Apple stock, there’s really no insurance right there, either. The concept of insurance doesn’t really apply now.”

The risky nature of crypto has become a bigger topic of discussion as several crypto companies show signs of faltering. Coinbase, one of the world’s most popular crypto exchanges, said in an earnings report last month that users could theoretically lose access to their crypto if the company went bankrupt. (Coinbase later tried to walk back the warning in a blog post, and said there’s “never a situation where customer funds could be confused with corporate assets.”)

Things have only gotten worse for the crypto industry lately. In the wake of the UST crash, the Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly investigating whether the company behind the coin, Terraform Labs, violated securities law. And last week, Celsius Network, a crypto platform that isn’t an actual bank but purports to offer high-yield cryptocurrency lending, suddenly barred its users from withdrawing from the platform; securities regulators in several states are now investigating that decision. Downtime can be extremely costly for crypto investors, since the value of a single coin can swing by hundreds or thousands of dollars within just a few hours. Amid all of the disruption, the price of bitcoin is around $20,000, a sharp decline from its November high of nearly $70,000.

“At the moment, there is no easy way for customers to determine the nature and extent of their exposure to the bankruptcy of a crypto trading platform,” Dan Awrey, a Cornell law professor, told Barron’s last month. “Customers should assume that a platform’s bankruptcy would expose them to significant delays in recovery, at the end of which they may only get back just pennies on the dollar.”

But there are other risks, too. A crypto wallet can be hacked, and once someone has stolen what’s in it, that crypto can be incredibly difficult to recover. Some people try to avoid this risk by protecting their crypto with what’s called “cold storage,” which amounts to storing the keys that people use to access their crypto on a hard drive that’s not connected to the internet. This method comes with the same kind of risks that any other piece of physical property does, and those risks are even more significant for companies that store lots of other peoples’ crypto in cold storage, and for crypto mining operations that produce new cryptocurrency using warehouses full of powerful computers.

“You got earthquake, flood, fire, lightning, wind, hail,” said Ben Davis, a team leader at Superscript, an insurance program that covers crypto and is registered as a broker on Lloyd’s insurance marketplace. “If you have a lot of very expensive equipment all in one place, you’re gonna want it insured.”

While some conventional insurance providers are slowly warming to covering crypto, there’s also an emerging crop of startups that focus specifically on crypto insurance. These include companies like InsurAce, which covers losses that result from crypto hacks, and Coincover, which offers NFT insurance, among several other crypto-focused products that come with insurance.

Some people are already filing claims for crypto losses. One judge in Ohio ruled in 2018 that bitcoin stolen from one man’s online account was legally property — not money — and should therefore be covered by the man’s homeowner’s insurance for its full value, which, at the time, was $16,000. After an explosion at a substation used by a bitcoin miner in upstate New York last month, a company that was affected, along with the crypto-miner, Blockfusion, said they would file a claim for the revenue they lost.

More recently, InsurAce’s Dan Thomson says the company paid out more than $11 million to people who bought “depegging” insurance for their UST, the stablecoin designed by Terraform Labs (depegging occurs when a cryptocurrency’s value no longer matches the fiat currency, or another type of asset, that it’s designed to track). The company also reimbursed some of its customers after hackers attacked a crypto platform called Elephant Money in April.

Although insurance is becoming a slightly bigger part of the crypto industry, coverage is still patchwork. And even when a crypto platform does buy insurance, there’s no guarantee that individual crypto holders who use that company’s platform are fully protected. Coinbase, for instance, says that while certain security events are protected by its insurance, even if the company tries to make people whole, its plan may not cover the entirety of someone’s losses. Overall, most of the activity in the world of crypto remains uninsured.

“It’s really, really, really small,” said Eyhab Aejaz, the co-founder and CEO of Breach Insurance, an insurance company that focuses on crypto. “There is just not enough insurance capacity out in the market to ensure even a small fraction of the total exposure is out there.”

This highlights a major problem when it comes to regulating crypto: There isn’t a strong consensus on what crypto is. Is it internet money, property, a scam, a digital asset, a security, a reasonable investment? And because there’s no agreement on what crypto is, it’s hard to come up with a good approach to insuring its value — or figuring out if it should even be protected in the first place.

Regulators are still studying how to approach crypto. The SEC has argued that at least some crypto products are securities, and earlier this year, President Joe Biden ordered federal agencies to start drafting new rules for the industry. A bipartisan bill from Sens. Kirstin Gillibrand (D-NY) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) aims to protect customers’ access to their cryptocurrency in the event the crypto exchange they’re using goes bankrupt, among other proposals for regulating the industry. At least one lawmaker, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, has proposed that the government expand FDIC coverage to certain types of stablecoin cryptocurrencies, as long as they’re provided by institutions that the government qualifies. The FDIC, Federal Reserve, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency have suggested similar plans. Still, not everyone thinks that’s a great idea or makes sense for every type of crypto.

“If crypto is an entirely speculative investment, then I think it’s unwise to put the deposit insurance and government backing behind those crypto assets,” said Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University. “Investors need to understand that what they’re doing is not putting money in a bank. What they’re doing is gambling.”

The mounting effort to regulate the crypto industry probably won’t be over anytime soon. In the meantime, all the chaos in the crypto market has more people thinking about the fate of their money. That may not be good news for crypto investors, but it’s certainly good news if you’re in the burgeoning crypto insurance business.

As reported by multiple outlets this past week, the popular cryptocurrency has lost 74% of its value from its record high in November. Coinbase says that Bitcoin fell as low as $17,601.58 and stayed below $20,000 on Saturday afternoon.

“Bitcoin breaking the $20,000 price level was long coming, given the pessimism that we have in the market,” said AvaTrade market analyst Naeem Aslam speaking to the Wall Street Journal.

Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency feeling the effects, with Techcrunch reporting that the total global market cap of cryptocurrencies sank below $850 billion Saturday. According to Techcrunch, another popular cryptocurrency, Ethereum (ETH), is down 80% since its record high back in November. ETH is trading at half of what it was a month ago, with it now being exchanged below $1,000.

Recessions are a difficult time for speculative assets and this latest crypto crash is coming during a challenging time for the crypto sector. Celsius, a leading lender in decentralized finance seems to have gone bankrupt, announcing in a tweet that it was pausing all transactions. There are other reasons for the crash too, such as the Feds raising interest rates to stave off the high inflation, but Stan Schroder does an excellent job explaining crypto’s crazy week.

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The importance of Bitcoin’s crashing can’t be understated. As a leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin dropping might trigger more sell-off in the market as investors lose confidence, according to The Washington Post. The same report also said that experts have no idea where the bottom is for Bitcoin due to how new crypto is along with current economic uncertainty.

For now, however, it’s not looking good for anyone who’s invested in crypto in the past year.

“I have never said that people should invest in crypto,” Elon Musk told the crowd during his virtual appearance at the Qatar Economic Forum after he was asked about the present state of cryptocurrency.

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Musk continued. “In the case of Tesla, SpaceX, myself, we all did buy some Bitcoin, but it’s a small percentage of our total cash assets,” he said.

This appears to be true, technically. Musk does not seem to have ever uttered the words “people should invest in crypto” or any sort of similar straightforward investment recommendation regarding cryptocurrency.

So, where would people get the idea to invest in cryptocurrency because of Elon Musk then?

Musk has sure had a lot to say about cryptocurrencies over the years. And some of it has been quite promotional, so much so that it would be easy to see how someone would think Musk was offering investment advice. Or at least strongly hinting at such.

Most people with an interest in Musk consume his words on Twitter, where he is one of the platform’s top users, closing in on 100 million followers. Here’s a compilation of just some of the things Musk has said regarding cryptocurrencies on Twitter:

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Let’s start with the time Elon Musk announced that his company, Tesla, would start accepting Bitcoin for vehicle purchases. Given that you have to buy Bitcoin to, well, spend it, and given that another way of saying “buy” is “invest in,” that seems rather promotional to me.

Musk later reversed course and suspended vehicle purchases via Bitcoin due to the negative environmental costs that were only later apparently explained to him.

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But, Musk also felt the need to reiterate how much he still believed in crypto after his decision to suspend Tesla purchases with Bitcoin.

And, of course, Tesla isn’t the only Elon Musk company that promotes cryptocurrency.

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Musk previously announced that SpaceX was going to launch a satellite literally named after the meme-inspired cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. The “mission” was also going to be paid for in Dogecoin as well as make history by making Dogecoin the “first crypto in space.”

Speaking of Dogecoin, it’s obvious the token is Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency as he’s plugged it more than any other crypto.

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Here’s Musk simply stating “Dogecoin rulez.”

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Here’s Musk plugging Dogecoin as the “people’s cryptocurrency.” In a follow-up he also explained to the “people” that there’s “no need to be a gigachad to own” Dogecoin.

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Here’s Musk soliciting for developers to help build out Dogecoin.

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This is Elon Musk saying he would “eat a happy meal on TV if McDonald’s accepts Dogecoin.” Again, people would need to acquire Dogecoin to use it!

And here’s his most recent plug of Dogecoin, tweeted during the big crypto crash which brought the crypto from its all-time high of 70 cents – which occurred when Elon Musk appeared on Saturday Night Live and plugged Dogecoin on network television – down to around five cents.

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“I will keep supporting Dogecoin,” tweeted Musk.

When he was asked to keep buying by another Twitter user, he replied: “I am.”

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And then there’s Elon Musk’s bizarre, not-so-subtle mentions of memecoins like Babydoge and Shiba Inu, both which pumped as a result of Musk’s Twitter shout outs.

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Musk also appears to view crypto as a direct competitor to fiat currency and not just an investment vehicle.

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To be fair, Musk has admitted that there are better things to invest in…even though he once again felt the need to hedge and share that he’s still bullish on cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Dogecoin

But yes, after looking through Musk’s Twitter history, he does appear to be correct. He has never directly told people to invest in cryptocurrency.

So, remember, as Elon Musk would say: “Cryptocurrency is promising, but please invest with caution!”

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Specifically, Neumann wants to put carbon credits on the blockchain. But making carbon credits easier to buy and sell does nothing to solve the real problem with carbon credits and offsets, which is that they’re broken. More easily trading a broken product doesn’t make it any less broken.

Neumann’s new company is called Flowcarbon, and it has big ambitions, which will be backed by $70 million from the crypto arm of the venture capital firm a16z. On its website, Flowcarbon says that the current system of buying and selling carbon credits is built on an “opaque and fractured market infrastructure” and that the carbon credits themselves have “little liquidity, accessibility, and price transparency.” In other words, the problem is the carbon credit market, and the way to fix it is by making it easier to trade carbon credits.

This is a classic argument for a crypto company, by the way. The answer for everything in the crypto world seems to be greater commodification. But when it comes to saving the planet (as with most things in life), that’s not necessarily true.

Carbon credits and offsets are two sides of the same coin, and the terms are often used interchangeably. A carbon offset refers to a project that reduces carbon dioxide emissions (preserving forests is a popular one), and carbon offsets generate carbon credits. And both trade in units that represent one metric ton of carbon dioxide. Flowcarbon is supposed to work through the creation of a new crypto token, called the Goddess Nature Token, or GNT. Those tokens would represent carbon credits, and Flowcarbon users looking to trade carbon credits would do so by buying and selling those tokens.

That second part has the potential to be problematic: Unlike stocks or cryptocurrencies, carbon offsets ultimately need to be taken off the market in order for them to have any lasting, traceable impact on a company or individual’s carbon footprint. Google, for example, “retires” any carbon offsets it buys, putting a stop to the trading so nobody else can claim their climate benefits. (How effective those offsets ever were is debatable.) Flowcarbon users have the option to retire their tokens, redeem them for classic carbon credits off the blockchain, or keep trading them. If a Flowcarbon user were to keep the carbon, well, flowing by trading away their carbon credits, they can’t claim to have offset any of their own emissions.

“I think they’re trying to solve something that’s not a problem,” Robert Mendelsohn, a professor of forest policy and economics at Yale, told Recode. “The kinds of things that blockchains are good at, which is sort of just making sure nothing gets lost, isn’t really a problem with the current market. That’s not where they’re broken. Where they’re broken is the credits themselves may not actually be causing any reduction in carbon.”

As my colleague Umair Irfan wrote in 2020, one of the key principles for making a good carbon credit is “additionality,” or ensuring that a carbon offset project will actually lead to a reduction of emissions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. This is trickier than it sounds: A 2020 Bloomberg investigation found that carbon offsets sold by the Nature Conservancy, one of the largest environmental nonprofits in the world, were based on forested properties that likely would have been preserved even without extra funding. In other words, the emissions reductions from those trees would have happened anyway, making them invalid as carbon offsets.

That’s just one example. Carbon credits and offsets frequently miss the mark, and in some cases can even cause additional harm to forests. Carbon offsets that don’t provide any additional emissions reductions allow companies who buy them to claim they’ve made a difference to their carbon footprint without having any real impact. “They haven’t offset anything,” Mendelsohn explained. “They’ve just got this worthless piece of paper saying they got a credit. You could put that credit onto the blockchain, and it would be just as worthless.”

It’s not exactly clear how Flowcarbon would actually make carbon offsets more useful or trustworthy. Nicole Shore, a Flowcarbon spokesperson, said in an email that the credits backing the GNT “follow the criteria of the global carbon market” and come from one of four large carbon credit registries. The company also says the carbon credits behind its token have been “certified,” but it doesn’t detail how that certification process happens, or if it has a verification system that’s any different from the current carbon credit market.

The difficulty of verifying carbon credits means it can take a while for more of them to come on the market. As more companies become interested in purchasing credits to offset their emissions, that can create a bottleneck.

“The problem with the current markets is nothing to do with how we can trade these more effectively,” said Anil Madhavapeddy, who is an associate professor of computer science and technology at Cambridge University and the director of the Cambridge Center for Carbon Credits. “We just do not have enough supply.”

Madhavapeddy, like Flowcarbon, is working on building a blockchain-based solution for carbon credits. But unlike Flowcarbon, he isn’t interested in building a marketplace for those credits. Instead, he’s focused on verifying they’re real by using satellite imagery and remote sensing technology to monitor carbon offset projects around the world and recording the results on the blockchain. Madhavapeddy hopes that technology will make it easier to get more carbon credits on the market more quickly.

Instead of building a whole new marketplace for carbon credits, for now, Madhavapeddy just wants to help ensure that those credits are based on something that will have a real impact. “Because the supply is so constrained, you don’t need to tokenize all these things,” Madhavapeddy told Recode. “It takes years for new (carbon offset) projects to kick off, so every marketplace constructed right now is just shuffling the same old pieces around.”

Crypto’s climate credit gold rush isn’t going unnoticed by the traditional players in the market, either. Verra, the world’s largest carbon-offset registry, announced this week that it will no longer allow its credits to be used as the basis for crypto tokens. Active crypto markets for carbon credits, Verra said, create too much confusion over who should get final credit for carbon reductions.

Once carbon credits become more readily available — and verifiably trustworthy — it’s possible companies like Flowcarbon could be key to making carbon credits and offsets more easily accessible to regular folks who are interested in offsetting their carbon emissions. But let’s not forget what happened last time Adam Neumann promised big things when founding a company with a questionable business model. WeWork speculated on how flexible our relationship with our built environment could be, and while it remains to be seen if Flowcarbon is any different, we can’t afford to leave our relationship with the natural world open to similar speculation.

Commodifying nature is part of what led us to our climate mess in the first place. Perhaps it’s time to learn from our mistakes.

The FTC says 46,000 people reported losing more than $1 billion worth of crypto in scams between January 2021 and March 2022, noting that this number is only the people who reported their losses to the FTC. It’s likely that the actual number of people scammed and crypto lost is much higher, as most victims don’t report their losses to the FTC.

Even though that $1 billion figure might not be reflective of the true amount of money lost, it does indicate just how much crypto scams have increased: Reported losses were nearly 60 times higher in 2021 than they were in 2018. And in the first quarter of 2022 alone, losses were already about half of what they were in all of 2021. A quarter of the money lost in reported scams is now in crypto.

Crypto already has a not-great reputation as a playground for illegal purchases, hacker ransoms, and money laundering. Its increasing role in old-fashioned scams won’t help enthusiasts make the case that virtual currency should play a larger role in legitimate financial markets and banks. While President Biden signed an executive order last March to come up with cryptocurrency regulations, it’s not known what those regulations will be, when they’ll be put in place, or if they’ll do anything to prevent scams.

Fraud experts say the trajectory is alarming, and will likely only get worse.

“When criminals latch onto a new way of stealing people’s money, others follow,” Kathy Stokes, director of fraud prevention at AARP, which has its own crypto scam-related resources, told Recode. “Combine this with the ‘legitimizing’ forces of pro-crypto ads and the move of 401(k) plan service providers to add this unregulated, highly speculative investment as an option for their plan participants, there’s no telling how many people will lose a lot of money — which they won’t likely get back.”

More than half of that $1 billion came from investment-related scams: people promising they can invest victims’ money into crypto for big returns. That type of scam isn’t new even if the type of currency used in it is, but the once-booming crypto market likely made it an easier sell to victims. It certainly helped that, until recently, people regularly reported making huge amounts of money as crypto prices exploded. Combine that with the fact that most people don’t know much about crypto in the first place and you have the perfect recipe for scams.

The second-highest losses came from romance scams, which seem to be related to investment scams. Typically, someone gains the victim’s trust through a relationship, then gets them to give their money to an investment scam or to the “keyboard Casanova,” as the FTC colorfully refers to them. The scammer then promises to invest the funds — only for the scammer to disappear with the money.

Coming in third was business and government impersonation scams that demand payment in crypto. Typically, someone will get a text, email, or call about a purchase they made or money they owe to a government agency. While the victim never made that purchase and doesn’t owe that money, they’re told that they have to pay up in order to make the problem go away. Increasingly, they’re told to make those payments in crypto, thanks to the widespread availability of crypto ATMs that make it quick and easy for victims to make those payments and difficult for investigators to trace them.

Younger people (aged 20 to 49) were three times more likely to be scammed this way than other age groups, but the average amount of money lost to scams increased with age. This is generally true of non-crypto scams, too: While the stereotype is that only older people fall for online scams, young people are actually more likely to be victims. Their losses, however, aren’t as devastating, as it’s usually less money, and it might be easier for them to recover financially.

Another reflection of the times and the medium: Almost half of people who reported being scammed said it originated on social media — mostly Instagram and Facebook. It’s worth noting that the FTC is a US agency, and platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp (where crypto scams also proliferate) are much more popular in other countries. That’s more than four times higher than the number of crypto scams that began on social media in 2018. Overall, social media-based scams (as in, those including all forms of currency, not just crypto) have ballooned in recent years.

This report is far from the only one to highlight how scammers are taking advantage of a loosely regulated and difficult-to-trace decentralized virtual currency landscape. That might make it a harder sell to consumers and regulators that crypto can be a legitimate and useful finance tool. While many crypto enthusiasts point to the benefits of currency that isn’t controlled by banks and governments, that lack of control makes it easy for bad actors to take advantage. And it should make consumers more wary of putting money into crypto, especially when even legitimate investments are losing money.

The FTC recommends staying away from investments that promise big returns, anything that requires payment in crypto, and not to mix online dating with investment advice. It also has a dedicated site for crypto-related fraud.

However, its founder Do Kwon has not given up. On Saturday, Terra developers relaunched a new version of Luna, the crypto linked to Terra, which was supposed to help keep the stablecoin pegged to $1.

Unfortunately for Terra and Luna advocates, Luna 2.0, as it’s being called, is already tanking.

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“Yesterday, we said Terra 2.0 is coming. Tomorrow, it arrives,” tweeted the official Terra developer account on Friday. “The community has been working around the clock to coordinate the new chain’s launch. Subject to potential change, we expect Terra to go live on May 28th, 2022 at around 06:00 AM UTC.”

Luna 2.0 was indeed launched, hitting a high of nearly $20. It is currently valued at around $5.75, according to CoinMarketCap, a near 75% drop.

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Along with the launch of the new, supposedly improved blockchain, Terra planned to airdrop Luna 2.0 tokens to the holders of the crypto on the old blockchain.

An airdrop is basically when an investor is gifted tokens as a result of their holdings. Terra decided to airdrop free Luna 2.0 to holders of the previous iteration as a way to make up for some of their losses.

Following the crash earlier this month, countless investors shared stories about how they lost their life savings in Terra and Luna. Terra, which again is supposed to consistently be valued at $1, is now worth pennies. Luna, which hit an all-time high value of $104 just this past March, is now worth fractions of a penny.

However, at least some of those investors who lost money and were airdropped the new Luna 2.0 tokens seem to have sold off their new crypto in order to recoup some of their losses.

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Luna 2.0 is currently hovering in the $5 range. Some legitimate Terra and Luna holders are reporting the airdrop enabled them to recoup a decimal-place percentage of their original investment.

But, based on some of the reactions from previous holders, there’s some distrust in the new project from Do Kwon and the rest of the team behind the failures of the old Terra and Luna.

With eyes set on Roblox’s 50 million-plus audience, Spotify is planting its flag firmly in the metaverse, the vast virtual frontier where you can do things like compete, earn prizes, buy merchandise or just hang out. As a music streaming service creating its own world on Roblox, the brand wants to connect artists with fans through an interactive, music-themed gaming experience.

Spotify Island invites players to collect hearts and musical notes — the streamer’s famous symbols — as they explore the island habitat where your wand conjures up surprises and mushrooms double as trampolines. It’s a bright and dazzling place where you can glide around, rack up objects, crank up a boombox or make your own tunes. Users can also shop for merchandise, collect currency, or chill with artists and fellow players in the game. And yes, there are free in-game items too!

At launch, Spotify welcomed two K-Pop artists to the island: Sunmi and Stray Kids. Each has their own line of digital goodies for sale on Spotify Island, and in the coming weeks, fans will be able to interact with them within the game. How? Players only have to hop over to K-Park, a digital destination for K-Pop fans and a major part of Spotify’s blueprint to grow its Roblox universe. It is one example of how Spotify aims to build social communities with artists at the center where they can engage with fans through meet-and-greets, exclusive content, quests and other features.

I had a chance to test the game out, and one of the coolest features in Spotify Island is Night Mode. Once you have enough coins, you can climb your way up a magical tree and flip the display to a darker setting. It’s like a neon-lit rave, and when you’re perched at the top of the tree, pull out your glowstick for added effect. According to Spotify, fellow players don’t have the ability to toggle between day and night mode as you’re enjoying your game. Your screen will stay the same.

The island also features a stage and screen that urges players to shoot a cannon, bust a move or see who’s in the spotlight. While there aren’t any official details about digital performances, Spotify wants you to stay tuned for special programming that will hit the screen. In the meantime, you can press play on Spotify Island on Roblox, a curated playlist for the game.

If you like the competitive aspect of Roblox games, be sure to check the leaderboard on Spotify Island to see who’s got the most hearts. They don’t work exactly like the hearts in the Spotify app that add favorites to your library, but you can track your riches so you can advance to new areas or level up your stable of moves and special effects. Additionally, be on the lookout for musical Easter eggs like the fruits that dot the island. Those watermelons you see are an ode to Watermelon Sugar by Harry Styles, and there are other audio clues in store.

Roblox isn’t Spotify’s only team-up in the world of video games. Prior to this, the company partnered with League of Legends, PlayStation and Xbox. In 2016, the company introduced its gaming section where users can find playlists to get into player mode or soundtracks for some of their favorite games such as Far Cry 6 and Godfall: Fire & Darkness.

“I don’t think the sentence ‘stolen NFT of a Bored Ape Yacht Club worth millions of dollars’ existed until a couple of weeks ago,” Janczewski told Recode. “There isn’t necessarily a playbook — or there isn’t a whole lot of experience — for people that have looked into those types of things.”

As a result, there’s growing interest in investigators like Janczewski, who know how to scour the blockchain — the massive public ledger that records cryptocurrency transactions — for clues that link anonymous exchanges of crypto to real people who can be sued or charged with a crime. These probes have brought to light all types of criminal operations, including a network of illegal bitcoin ATMs that a New York man used for money laundering, and a $1.1 million “rug pull” involving NFT cartoons called Frosties. (An NFT rug pull occurs when someone tricks people into investing in an NFT project, only to cancel the project later and keep the money.)

Demand for crypto crime-fighters is booming. The Securities and Exchange Commission last week said it would double the size of its cyber unit and expand its focus on the crypto industry, including NFTs and crypto asset exchanges. The Department of Justice formed a crypto enforcement group last fall, and the FBI said in February it would assemble its own crypto team.

At the same time, there’s also been a surge in business for private outfits that run their own crypto investigations, often on behalf of individuals or other companies. Companies like TRM Labs and CipherBlade, another blockchain investigation firm, act almost like private eyes for the crypto age. There are even crypto vigilantes: independent, and often anonymous, internet sleuths who search for evidence of crypto scams and schemes in their free time.

Like most things crypto-related, crypto detective work isn’t necessarily intuitive. Crypto transactions are all publicly recorded, which means that identifying the wallets criminals use to store their digital currency is relatively simple. But because these transactions are also anonymous, crypto investigators have to look for leads that can connect a particular crypto transaction to other activity on the web.

For instance, they might be able to tie a wallet, which is effectively an address for a crypto account, to an established platform, like Coinbase — these companies are legally required to track the identities of their customers — or a portion of the dark web that’s already on investigators’ radar. Doing these investigations often requires going undercover online, sometimes using covert, disguised accounts that the government has seized and kept on hand for years.

“In traditional investigations, we know who committed the crimes and follow the money to prove it,” explains Dana Windsor, a spokesperson for the IRS’s criminal investigations unit, which had 80 crypto-related cases on its docket at the end of last year. “In crypto investigations, we know what the crime is and follow the money to prove who committed the crime.”

That might sound simple enough, but finding these connections is extremely difficult, and generally requires technical expertise that veteran detectives just don’t have. Federal agencies like the IRS, the FBI, and the State Department have spent millions of dollars on contracts with private crypto intelligence firms. These companies often have access to powerful machine learning software that can sift through huge numbers of transactions and look for leads. Even with this software, these investigations are getting harder, since criminals are constantly developing new ways of concealing their methods.

One of the biggest hurdles ahead for crypto crime-fighting is the fact that there’s not necessarily an established pipeline of people who can help. Right now, there’s no specific pathway to becoming a crypto investigator, so it’s mostly been a career people have stumbled upon. Janczewski, for instance, studied accounting before he became a crypto cop for the IRS. And CipherBlade crypto researcher Paul Sibenik told Recode he got into crypto detective work after he ran a side gig as a consultant for people in divorce cases who thought their spouses were stashing away bitcoin.

Another problem is that some of the firms that have the crypto expertise the government needs are, at the same time, running afoul of regulators. Last month, for instance, Anchorage Digital — the bitcoin bank the US Marshals Service hired to store the crypto the government seizes after criminal investigations — was flagged by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for violating money-laundering rules. Now that contract is on hold.

Of course, the people who best know their way around the blockchain may be more interested in profiting from crypto than regulating it. Many of the people most excited about crypto are actively opposed to the notion of stepping up enforcement.

“Government has a very difficult time competing in the area of crypto because the technologists are recruited heavily into the Web3 space because there’s so much venture capital money,” John Reed Stark, an outspoken critic of crypto and the former chief of the SEC’s Office of Internet Enforcement, told Recode. “There is absolutely a real brain drain in government when it comes to technology.”

That could soon be a big problem. President Joe Biden has insisted that there’s a place for cryptocurrency in the mainstream, provided that there’s a place for cryptocurrency rules, too. But without people to enforce those rules, it’s not clear that much will change in the world of crypto. After all, as long as there’s crypto flowing through our financial system, there will be people determined to use it in less-than-legal ways.

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