MrBeast gets linked to $23M in crypto scams

It’s been a very interesting year for MrBeast, the world’s most popular YouTuber.

As they say, when it rains, it pours:

• His co-host, Kris Ava Tyson, was accused of grooming a minor.

• Contestants described the conditions on the set of his Amazon show as unsafe.

• Fellow YouTuber Rosanna Pansino reported him to the FBI with text evidence that he knew all along about Ava Tyson’s behavior. 

• He launched a Lunchables competitor with Logan Paul and KSI…that might contain mold.

Unfortunately for Beast, the rain is showing no sign of stopping, as he is now being accused of swindling $23M from a multitude of crypto scams.

The accusations come from the crypto advisory firm Loock, which appears to be a team of on-chain analysts. If you’re not up to date with your crypto lingo, an on-chain analyst is just someone very good at tracking where money flows, which is made easier by the fact that every crypto transaction is publicly viewable.

So, for example, if I promoted and profited off a scam token, an on-chain analyst could track where the money goes so that the authorities can freeze my illegally obtained gains, link it to any wallet (on-chain bank account) or exchange I might use, and ultimately ensure that I can't easily get away with the crime.

This is exactly what Loock did with MrBeast.

The report is very long and technical, but the gist of it is this: they were cleverly able to use his prior social media posts where he posted about buying NFTs to find his wallet, and from there, were able to use exchange and wallet interactions to find 50 more affiliated wallets. 

It was from looking at these wallets and his social media posts that they were able to see that MrBeast is either the greatest trader of all time, or is engaged in some serious chicanery. Just take a look at these wins:

• $11.4M from a $124k investment in the NFT gaming project SuperVerse.

• $4.6M from a $128K investment in NFT marketplace Ethernity Chain.

• $1M from an investment in the Web3 AI and storage token AIOZ. 

• $193K from an investment in the NFT marketplace Refinable.

• $500K from a $25K investment in the real work tokenization project SHOPX.

• $287K from the creator token XCAD.

• $1.3M from the DAO token Jigstak.

• $1.7M from the digital collectible Polychain Monsters.

Now, is it impossible for someone to make this much money trading? Of course not. You can put in the hours and get very, very good. But, as Loock puts it, it is extremely unlikely for a full-time content creator to have the time to do this:

“With MrBeast’s track record of consistently hitting large returns whilst being a full-time content creator and owning various businesses, there is an extremely high likelihood that his success in cryptocurrency investing is not the result of sharp trading intuition but just knowing insider information, particularly related to upcoming brand deals and partnerships within his network, including figures like KSI, GaryVee, and LazarBeam.”

Basically, they are accusing him of insider trading. 

If this is true, he wouldn’t be the first celebrity to use their status to get ahead in crypto, and he definitely won’t be the last. 

But, with all of the drama he is already facing, this is just another stain on a previously pristine reputation.