Released: 30th March
Seen: 2nd April
The world of Cryptocurrency is strange, to say the least. The well-known internet currency has fiercely loyal believers and just as fierce sceptics who believe the entire concept is basically one of the strangest scams that have somehow gotten to be accepted by a surprisingly large part of the community.
If you mention “I think Bitcoin is a load of shit” on Twitter and watch as your mentions are filled with bros exclaiming how you don’t actually understand it and how it’s not that bad, it’s not that scammy… well, now you can send those mouthbreathers a link to the film Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King and watch as they… OK, they probably won’t accept they’re part of a scam, but you’ll know and that’s what matters.
Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King tells the strange tale of Gerry Cotten, the founder and CEO of Quadriga Fintech Solutions which ran QuadrigaCX which was Canada’s largest Cryptocurrency exchange right up until 2019 when it filed for bankruptcy. See, turns out that QuadrigaCX was a big old scam that took a bunch of people’s money and gave them fake bitcoin. Oh, and also the CEO Gerry Cotten mysteriously died, taking with him the passwords to a whole bunch of crypto-wallets that might contain the money of a bunch of his victims who believe Gerry faked his death. It’s an absolutely insane ride that’s hard to summarise in a single paragraph but key point is, there’s a whole lot of scamming going on.
For those who are blessed to not know a single solitary thing about Crypto (I ENVY YOU), Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King is very good at walking you through a lot of the key information you need to know in clear enough language that you should be able to grab onto what’s happening. Sure some of it might not quite make sense just because there is a ton of technical jargon you have to keep up with, but you’ll get the broad strokes pretty quickly which helps when they start actually getting into the details of the scam, the strange events surrounding it and just how much money people lost because of this.
Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King uses a combination of standard talking-head interviews and recreations of online chats to really help put you in the moment. Surprisingly most of the people involved seem willing to trust the filmmakers enough to put their faces on camera except for one glorious person who spends their entire interview wearing a large low poly wolf’s head to protect their identity. The sight of someone talking so seriously about this elaborate scheme while wearing a wolf’s head is not even in the top 5 list of strange things about this story, but it’s the one you need to know about because it’s what’s going to make you need to see this.
The entire insane tragic and comedic story is laid out pretty well, showing the moments when people realised something was wrong, letting you know their thought process as the events were happening and even has the perspective to call out the times when the people involved went too far (Hint: It’s a bunch of men on the internet and there was a woman involved who might possibly know something about what happened… can you take a wild guess how that went). Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King is a really fair movie to all parties, being willing to call out each side when needed without really shying away from the reality that most of the people here were victims of a pretty elaborate scam.
Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King is a must-see for anyone looking into the dark side of the Crypto world, honestly it would make a fantastic double feature with the wonderful Line Goes Up documentary that did the rounds on YouTube a while ago. It’s important to see just how easily this ‘new currency’ can be used to scam people out of money that they could actually use (Seriously it’s kind of ironic that this entire scam can be boiled down to “People couldn’t exchange their fake money for real money” and that people somehow didn’t realise that maybe this meant Crypto was a bad idea), and Trust No One: The Hunt For The Crypto King is a pretty great expose of that exact issue.
Movie Meister Reviews 