Why Crypto’s Thriving Post-SBF, Sports Betting Crisis Deepens, Jon Stewart vs. AI

0:00Why is crypto thriving after SBF? The sports betting crisis is deepening and Jon Stewart comes out against AI. All that and more is coming up with special guest Zeke Fox right after this. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition where we break down the news in our cool-headed and nuanced format. We have quite a show for you today. We have Ranjan Roy here. Ranjan is back from France. Ranjan, welcome. I'm very excited about today. Number Go Up was one of my favorite books of last year. Yeah, this is another episode that's Ranjan-inspired. Ranjan, you kept shouting out Number Go Up on the show.

0:35I read it, definitely one of my favorite books as well. And we're so lucky to have the author here, Zeke Fox, who's the author of Number Go Up. He's also a reporter at Bloomberg. Zeke, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. And I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that it's Earthquake Friday here in New York. I know anybody listening to this show is probably over the long media cycle that New Yorkers have had over a manageable 4.8 magnitude earthquake. But I'm not. I mean, we just had the earth shake beneath our feet. Pretty cool stuff. We should continue talking about it for weeks on end as New Yorkers experiencing that.

1:14That's my platform. We also have some big earth shaking developments. See what I did there? In the crypto world. including the fact that SPF is going away for 25 years, or at least that's the sentence. It will probably be less than that. Last week, we talked about the sentencing. This week, I want to talk really about the most confusing thing about all this, which is that SPF is gone, a 25-year sentence, yet Bitcoin is up 53 % this year. Mean coins are proliferating, and it seems like crypto really hasn't lost a step. In fact, it's gaining. And, you know, Zeke, you have a story out in Bloomberg talking about how the fall of FTX wasn't the exception or it wasn't just a good company that had some bad decisions.

1:57It was rotten to the core and it's a warning to all of crypto. So with that lens, I want you to explain to us why crypto continues. It's having really a banner year when the warning signs are still ever present. And a lot of the problems that led to the downfall of FTX and a legion of other exchanges and banks, you know, they have not been fixed. One funny detail from that story is that apparently Sam Bankman-Fried has been giving some trading advice to the guards at MDC Brooklyn, the prison where he has been confined since before the trial. And he told them that they should sell Ripple and buy Solana.

2:41and if they took his advice you know they've probably like doubled their money right you know it was excellent trading advice yeah and but so all of crypto is back but then the flip side is that we learned at this trial that if anything ft the ftx scam started really early they were dipping into the customer fund he was eyeing the customer funds before he even started the exchange and started dipping into them pretty much right away. And when you talk to crypto traders now, I mean, I've heard this from quite a few people. It's almost like they've dropped the pretense that they're creating the future of finance, that something cool is going on and totally embraced number go up thinking.

3:29You don't hear people talking about DeFi, talking about NFTs. I don't even really get the same chatter from like normal people being excited about crypto, but they're buying just like ever stupider meme coins. And for now, they're all going up. It's truly unbelievable to me. I would be lying if I said I predicted this. But conveniently, you did. Your book is called Number Go Up, Zeke. You can't take can't deny credit for what's happening right now. Credit. This is your time. That is my favorite part of this entire cycle is that exactly the blockchain is not the key development. As you said, DeFi, it's not DAOs and decentralized communities.

4:14It's literally the price is going up and everyone is happy. But yeah, what are the mechanics behind here? What do you think the mechanics are that are pushing this? If there's no underlying narrative, each previous hype cycle had a very clear narrative, then what is it? I would separate it into two categories. And category one is just like gambling is fun. And people love playing the lottery, even though the odds of you winning are like one in 300 million. in and so people want to play this meme coin game or not everybody but just some percentage of people find this game entertaining and thus it continues um i mean one funny example of that is this guy machi big brother i don't know if he already had the dog or he acquired it for this purpose but he got like a very cute dog and then he posted his solana address and said like you know if you send me money at this address i'm gonna send you some dog tokens i mean it was there was no formal setup it was just like here's my address send money the dog tokens will come people sent like 40 million dollars is this dog with hat because dog with hat is my favorite of all the coins oh oh no this is like dog with hat is like a blue chip stock it's kind of boring people have moved on to like new uh new dog tokens and cat tokens i just love the way that journalists have to write about this so this was on yahoo finance it's talking about doug with hat it says based on the solana chain the token is based on a meme of a dog wearing a pink knitted hat a cap so it makes sense that the project's headline is that it's literally just a dog with a hat despite its simplicity and lack of innovative ideas the token has performed far better than anyone could have imagine it began trading in 2024 for just seven cents but quickly gained steam by the end of february the price surpassed one dollar by the end of march the price broke an all-time high and reached four dollars and 85 cents a gain of seven thousand percent in less than three months dog with hat telling you there's something to it yeah i mean so this is just like it's this sort of it's like the meme stocks like GameStop or AMC and where it's just it's sort of this fun new game that didn't really exist in markets before where it's like it's like a pump and dump scheme but people are doing it to themselves they're like let's let's all buy dog with hat and if enough people buy it it's gonna go up and I'm gonna get out before I'm gonna be one of the lucky ones who gets out before it all collapses.

7:07And I was trying to research the psychology behind this. I was reading a 1936 book by John Maynard Keynes. And he said, he compared the stock market to a game of musical chairs and said, like, hey, people just, it's a game that we can, everyone still enjoys playing it, even knowing that there are going to be like winners and losers. It's kind of like a zero sum game. So I think that explains a lot of the crypto activity. Then you've got Bitcoin, which is a little different, although maybe just sort of a more long term version of the same thing where people have sort of given up on this idea that Bitcoin is the future of finance, that it's good for transactions.

7:54But people see you see the price going up, you start to feel like, oh, man, wouldn't it be nice if I had some of that in my portfolio? I wish I had something that gained 50 percent this year. You buy. And that pushes the price up a little more. And so also addressed by Keynes conveniently, we're all trying to guess, not like do we think Bitcoin is good, but like do we think that other people think that Bitcoin is good or do we think that we're trying to guess like other people's opinions of this and lately everyone's opinions have been look at the price going up let's get in on it um and i keep coming back to this idea that in the long run value has to come from some sort of profitable use case.

8:47Don't be ridiculous, Zeke. Come on. Number go up. This is amazing. I like that we were bringing in Keynesian historical references, whereas to me, the more interesting part was the psychological part of essentially a self-inflicted pump and dump. People want to pump and dump onto themselves, but in reality, that is what meme coin trading is. This is from Molly White this week. She has this amazing story. There is a project promising to rug pull, and it's raised almost$29 ,000. And this is what she says. A project describing itself as the world's first meme coin pre-announced as a rug pull was explicit in its marking.

9:33Do not buy this coin. It will go to zero. Despite that, people sent the creator over 8.8 ETH, which is$29 ,000 approximately, during the project's pre-sale. I mean, does it get any dumber than this? You know, I feel like part of crypto is sort of a competition to come up with the dumbest ideas so that everyone will be like, wow, this one really takes the cake. Let me invest in this one. There's this like kind of nihilistic attitude that dumber is better. And I thought I had always admired the NFT collection, Crypto Dick Butts. And do you remember this one? One of the greats. Yeah. Yeah. So it was like butts, pixelated butts with penises growing out of them.

10:24And I thought this is the dumbest one ever. I can see why this went to, you know,$5 ,000. And if I could think of something dumber, maybe I could be a billionaire. But I was never able to think of something dumber than that. But now, yeah, with the dog coins, people have topped it. Here's my theory on this is, do you believe there is something more sophisticated? I don't want to use the word nefarious behind all of this in the sense that one of the things that always I remember when Beeple sold the I think it was 64 million dollar digital art it was essentially kind of like crypto NFT promoters who were buying that using crypto given gains and then they were going to like going on once they create that hype cycle to sell other tokens try to make more money on top of it so the initial ridiculousness you know the same way with the rug pull maybe is the idea put a little money you put eight eighth in the dumbest thing out there and then the thing you're selling to the market is actually not that dumb as you know the rug pull token like are there are there sophisticated ideas behind crypto dick butt and uh the project rug pull that might be the best question ever asked on this podcast i did it with a serious voice too So I'm not going to I don't want to accuse Mr.

11:56Rugpoll of anything, but I'm just going to throw this out there as a possibility of something that a scheme that one could do. I mean, I could announce let's say we all teamed up. I could announce Rugpoll token and we let's say we all have we're all working together. And then you guys could send me, you know, seven ETH. and then the internet would see this and be like, oh, looks like rug pull tokens really taking off. It's collected seven ETH. Somebody else sends me one ETH and we just made, I mean, it's very easy to make these tokens. We just made a one ETH profit. We could split it three ways.

12:36So like the people who are organizing these coins, it would not be difficult for them to rig it so that they were going to profit no matter what happened. I'm not saying that they all are, but like when you come in and like you're sending some money in because you think it's funny on the Internet, like the odds are against you. The insiders, there's at least like a possibility that they've rigged this in their favor. I mean, they didn't set it up just to laugh. I mean, you never know. Maybe they did. But there's some chance they didn't just set it up to laugh. First of all, great business idea.

13:11We'll be in touch after the show. Second, is there something broader about our society right now where we have, for instance, potentially not given a large portion of society a path to, you know, build wealth? Like last week on the show, Reid Albergati and I were joking about like, you know, how difficult it is to build retirement savings. And is it that we've just created such a desperate moment in society that people decide that they need to go this route? I mean, there was a story that I read recently about people taking their student loans and putting them into sports betting. It's insane.

13:46But is there a broader commentary that we should be thinking about here when we talk about all this insanity? I totally think you're right. And I once had a really interesting conversation with a closet salesman at IKEA. And, like, I chat everybody up about crypto. So we started talking crypto and meme stocks and he'd lost some money on them. And I was telling him, I hope I wasn't being too obnoxious, but just trust me, this fit in the flow of conversation. I was telling him, you know, I just go with broad market ETFs and that historically they've gone up, you know, eight or 10 percent a year.

14:28And I think it's kind of a fool's game to try and beat the market. And he was like, that might be well and good for you, person who's about to drop, you know, a thousand bucks on a closet. I work here. I don't have any extra money. I need 100x. Like, I'm going to go buy the next crypto token and hope that it helps me get to my financial goals because 8 or 10 percent is not doing anything for me. I'll disagree with both of you here, though. The narrative that after the financial crisis, people lost faith in traditional economics, like the banks and infrastructure, and obviously student loan weight, and there are income inequality, and these are things that are clearly ever present in society.

15:12But to me, this is more just a lack of regulation. It's a new type of technology. It's made for betting, and it's fun. But again, the idea that people have lost so much hope, how many people really paid attention to 8 % returns over time, annualized, will help me achieve a financial goal? It's always been more fun to bet on crypto dick butt or whatever the corollary was for time memoriam. This was a family show up until today. You just weren't allowed to bet on crypto dick butt in the past. or you had no easy way to do it that's um that's what warren buffett said in his most recent annual letter he was just like you know he was mostly about how much money he'd made on crypto dick butts uh but then there was like a sub there was a footnote that you warren buffett and his with his omaha accent yeah well crypto dick butt's been good to us it's been good um he he said it's The casino is in everybody's pocket.

16:16It's never been easier. And that may be what's driving this more volatile stock market and also these weird crypto things. If this is a betting thing, then what do we think about the institutions that are trying to take advantage of the degens or degenerate gamblers who are putting all this money into crypto projects? And, you know, I'm going to point to like where this discussion initiated, where I read your book and I was like, Zeke, why don't you come on the show to help us review Chris Dixon's book, the Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalist who wrote Read, Write, Own, who's been part of the institutional movement to try to get people.

16:54You know, it's not just the Bitcoin ETFs that I understand a little bit more, but like to he's been investing in these projects, these Web3, quote unquote, projects, which have been effective. Many of them effectively have been rug pulls for the degenerate gamblers who've gone in. Meanwhile, it seems like Andreessen Horowitz has done quite well. yeah i mean i that book it was it was shocking to me that this book was about the promise of web 3 but it did not address the abject failure of so many of the projects that he had invested in and in in number go up i investigated one of them the game axi infinity and this was like if you're not familiar it was kind of like a pokemon-ish game where you assembled a team of monsters and battled other monsters and what made it a crypto game was that you had to buy your monsters and you owned them that's web 3 and then when you battled you would earn smooth love potions and you might say like well why would you want smooth love potions well you need them to buy your monsters why do you want the monsters well you can earn smooth love potions so uh it it turned out that the way they set up the economics of the game you could essentially earn like a five or ten percent daily yield in smooth love potions by purchasing these monsters so people caught on to this and it took off it was huge in the philippines there were like more than a million people playing it.

18:35And of course, Andreessen Horowitz invested in the company that created this. Their fund has great returns. But what naturally, Smooth Love Potion prices collapsed, like this scheme was unsustainable. And I went to the Philippines and talked to people who had taken out loans, altered their life plans, went into big debt to buy these Axie Infinity monsters, and who are devastated when the price of smooth love potions collapsed.

19:08So I think there's probably some argument you could make in favor of Web3, but at least address how this was screwed up. Nobody has said sorry.

19:23Nobody's really said like, oh, wow, we really set up the economics wrong. um so yes so i i did find that surprising that he's um they've invested in some of these in many failed projects and he just sort of hasn't changed his story about how web 3 is the future yeah i think axie infinity to me and actually i mean in terms of one of the things number go up i think did very well was tell the human stories of the people who lost out because again the only stories we traditionally hear are the people who won for short periods of time in order to get more people interested. But, you know, these stories of because especially I remember Axie Infinity, when it launched and what really drove the hype was there are these viral videos of people in the Philippines finding economic empowerment through smooth love potion and turning their lives around.

20:19And anyone I spoke to in crypto would point directly to that and say, look, were already changing the world and then until they weren't. So, yeah, and I think that's important. I might be showing my age here, but I always thought of Axi Infinity as sort of being like the monorail episode of The Simpsons. Oh, no. Okay. You know, where a neighboring town is, this monorail salesman comes to Springfield and just like gives this whole pitch about how it's going to change the town to get this monorail. And then I think it's Marge goes to investigate and she goes to this neighboring town that got a monorail.

21:00And like the whole town is burned down for some, it's like this wasteland. And to me, Axie Infinity, it's like, this is where you tried your Web3 plan and it totally sucked. You know, it's like a vision of our Web3 future. And so, yeah, if you're still promoting that, you need to tell me why it makes more sense. And another one that, I mean, they were investors in Yuga. I think, didn't they invest in Yuga Labs? They invested in Bored Apes, right? Yep. $450 million round led by A16Z. Yeah. So like, what were you thinking there, Chris Dixon? What was the logic behind the Bored Ape investment? Now those have become like a total laughingstock.

21:48Well, do you think there's that idea of no one has said sorry? That's something I've thought about a lot because even Sam Bankman Freed is heading to prison for 25 years and hasn't really said I'm sorry. But do you think there needs to be some kind of compunction or recognition of what happened over the last four years? or do you think, I mean, is the strategy, which it looks like it's happening is to just triple down on this is a future. We're going to make money again on the next cycle. Yeah. I mean, I was pretty shocked recently. It took me a while to get around to it, but I, so Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, they've definitely been big on the message of like, it's safe for crypto now.

22:33The bad guys are gone. Let's get the next cycle going. And they have this new product called base it's their level two and i've essentially it's very easy to create your own coins that like live on this base network and it's got lower transaction fees because it's sort of self-contained as opposed to like ethereum which has gotten very expensive to transact on so i gave it a try the other day i went on there to see like okay i'm all continually my expectations are too high and i'm like well if coinbase is really pushing this there must be some cool things on base and i get on there to trade some like base coins and all it is is the same it's like i guess people associate blue with base because coinbase base is blue so it's like blue dog with hat blue cat with hat blue elon musk like literally this is diversification of your portfolio dog with fat blue dog with fat gotta have a little of each that's for sure so look at but as we're talking about this i just want to say like is is it possible that this has more staying power than we are giving it credit for because zeke like the core of your book is investigating tether which has all sorts of shady things happening beneath it which you're able to uncover and a real questionable sort of uh provenance however tether is still at a dollar right it's a coin that's just tethered to the US dollar, still at a dollar.

24:05None of these shocks have taken it down. Bitcoin is high. I mean, yes, there's going to be this like wacky movement on the fringes, but does the crypto movement have a brighter future than perhaps we're giving it credit for right here? Yeah. I mean, right now, you know, you can, if you like crypto, You're thinking, this guy is so dumb and the market proves it. His book title is dead wrong because it was intended to be a joke. It was not predicting the number would go up. But I think this isn't like a real technical analysis. But I would think hard about these bored apes. Why did they, as a sign of what might happen to the whole market, like for a while i guess enough people thought they were cool somehow that the price got very high and now since they don't do anything and they aren't cool the price is going down so while you're out there promoting all these coins they either have to be like fun and cool or they have to do something and if they don't meet either of those criteria i think eventually people will lose interest and they might find something else to do.

25:19So I still am very negative on this long term for those reasons. I just think if it's not, it hasn't found like a product that's got mainstream acceptance, just being gambling games is not enough. Do you think part of the recent rise of crypto, at least one of my theories is anytime hype returns to the market, even for a more fundamental reason, it will have trickle down effects to dog with hat. And in this case, people saw Nvidia skyrocketing, AI driving the standard stock market. And again, you look at the regular stock market, there's not much left in the meme stock way, but more of the blue chip stocks positioned well to capture Jenner today I have absolutely blown up well do you think it's more the people who didn't get in on Nvidia want to buy dog with hat because it's the next thing I guess there could be some of that where yeah just things were moving around a lot so let's we've seen in the past that when risk assets go up dog coins also go up so let's let's buy some dog coins um i mean i do think there's a risk if you buy the dog coins that you could be the guy who is holding the dog coins when everyone else remembers that the dog coins don't do anything and we don't there's no need for they're worthless um but i don't know it's it's like game stop amc those did go down over time these like memes are not are not forever But I guess, yeah, like what do you think is holding it?

27:09Because even Tether, like as Alex said, and reading through your whole book and for a long time, I've followed the Tether story closely as well. And obviously the absurdity isn't quite crypto dick butt level, but inspector gadget creator being part of it or all these other nuances is quite incredible. But again, the idea that every sign points to it should collapse, and yet it holds. Like, what are the forces that... Because in the book, I think you push towards a lot of ideas. But I mean, I think in fairness, don't definitively say what you're thinking of what is actually keeping Tether up. But like, what is it now?

27:54Since the book has come out, Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which is a respectable New York investment bank, has come out and said, I'm holding most of Tether's money and I've seen the rest. They have the money. And I think, barring evidence of some sort of crazy conspiracy, his comments carry a lot of weight with me. And I think that Tether has been helped by rising interest rates. and now so they're sitting on like a hundred billion dollars that's how many tether tokens are out there they don't pay interest and they haven't invested in treasuries at like five percent so they're clipping five billion dollars in profit a year now and so if in let's just say for the sake of argument tether had a sam bankman freeze freed sized hole of eight billion dollars they could earn that back in a year and a half.

28:57Where I come down on it is that there's clear evidence of a lot of shadiness in Tether's early years. But now what it seems to me is that Tether's found widespread acceptance among people doing shady things around the world who are willing to overlook red flags and are willing to hold a dollar coin that doesn't pay interest. You know, whereas in the U.S., you'd be like, why don't I just put this in my, you know, Apple wallet and get five percent. Zeke, as we round out this segment, I want to talk to you about like one of the like clear negative externalities or uses of Tether, which is pig butchering, which you go into depth and take an amazing trip in your book to a place that was tied directly to these scandals.

29:49So I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about that. And then just as a corollary to that, does that relate to all these nudes and bio tweets that we're seeing on Twitter today? Sure. So if you're not familiar, pig butchering is a scam where someone approaches you either on a dating app, LinkedIn, whatever, a wrong number text is common. and they try to be your friend and they start to drop hints that they're really good at trading crypto. And eventually they get you to download some sort of bootleg crypto app and to send them usually Tether to deposit into that app. And they'll even you can open the app.

30:35It looks like you're making money. It seems great. And people start to send in more and more money. Like I was just at a press conference held by the Brooklyn DA yesterday, where they talked about victims who'd sent hundreds of thousands of dollars. And eventually the scammer will just ghost you and take all the money. And the really dark part of it that I write about in the book is that the people, the scammers themselves are often victims of human trafficking. And there are these scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, which are like evil office parks filled with thousands of people who've been lured there with the offer of like a high paying job and customer service.

31:20They get there. They're trapped. They are tortured. They're beaten. They're forced to run these scams. And it's hugely lucrative. It's mostly run by Chinese gangsters. and new research by professor at UT Austin says that these gangs have collected in the last few years something like 75 billion dollars mostly using tether um which is pretty wild and if you go to uh so this doesn't you know this obviously doesn't prove anything but in my I'd spent like years looking into tether by this point the first time i saw tether in use in the real world was when i was in a border town on the border of cambodia vietnam one that's known to hold a lot of scam compounds i get off the bus and right in the parking lot of one of these casinos that is known to be a site for forced labor there's a little booth that's like we'll trade your tethers for local currency and i'm like i literally don't think i'd seen the tether logo outside of a crypto conference until i got there and i'm just like hmm doesn't prove anything but kind of a bad sign that this is the the place where i actually see crypto in the real world that's crazy and so is that what's going on with these uh nudes and bio scams on on twitter so based on uh research by john herman for new york magazine he followed some of these scams and wait sorry could you guys explain the nudes and bio scam oh yeah so there's often on any sort of popular tweet someone will reply with this tweet in a kind of funny format with a lot of weird like black spaces in it they'll write like nudes in bio and they're trying to obviously lure you into clicking and if you do click through it takes you to like a very particular fake dating site called provocative neighbors where you can pay to chat with i guess like supposedly horny singles uh who are actually gig workers who get paid on commission on so it's it's kind of similar to the pig butchering model but i've i've do not i've yet to meet anyone who's escaped from a scam compound who had to work on these uh nudes and bio replies so that they may be fully voluntary This is more traditional catfishing than something more sinister.

34:18And I think it just shows. So I once spent a while researching affiliate, the shady side of affiliate marketing. And there's always been these guys who will buy up ads on like porn sites and direct people into these kind of low end scams. they call them like dating sites but it's not real dating and i think what happened is that twitter has such bad content moderation and is getting really low prices for its ads now so it's it's getting like these porn site quality ads that used to be screened out by better moderation or just higher prices for they're not just ads though like they just show up like in the replies as like bots and i mean it could all be true was going to save us from the bots on twitter yeah but okay one last thing about this and then then we'll go to break it's what's interesting i also read in the herman story is that like this is just sort of like the tip of the iceberg when it comes to only fans agencies so there are companies that run this is what he says there are companies that run only fan only fans accounts that are staffed and they talk simultaneously with dozens of users who are led to believe they are talking with real models, not male operators in, say, Poland.

35:44And there's a quote, every guy has three monitors, three chats at a time. Wow. Just sad. So before we go, I just wanted to ask one thing, because again, from reading the book, there's one thing that I kept thinking about going back to pig butchering, it's almost rare you have a scam where both sides of the scam are victims. And then there's a middleman who's kind of controlling it versus usually you have the very clear scammer and the scammy. But here's something that's so awful where you have people losing their money on the being scam side and then literal human trafficking to help drive these scams.

36:27And obviously, like, why is this not more of a story? And I've seen, I think, John Oliver did a segment, I've started to see it some more coming out. But you know, there's some stories when I read them, after reading your book, all I can think about is why are more people not talking about this? Or why hasn't this gotten more attention? And I'm assuming you want more people to read your book. And that would be step one. But in general, like, is there something to this story that prevents people from just jumping towards it as this massive thing we need to work together to solve? From a government perspective, I think it's tricky to solve because the criminals are in other countries where in some of these places they operate pretty much with impunity and the U.S.

37:18doesn't have any authority there. So what people activists are doing is trying to work with law enforcement in those countries to push for more raids of scam compounds for them to stop, you know, looking the other way and to make it into sort of an embarrassment. So they can't like in Cambodia, it became kind of like a national embarrassment, which led to at least some raids, although they continue to operate in Cambodia. But from a law enforcement side here, somebody comes to them and they say, hey, I lost a million dollars to pig butchering. And if you're lucky enough to find, first of all, a lot of police officers don't know about this because they might not understand what happened or how they might be able to help.

38:11Even if they are savvy, the money is long gone. And that's why crypto is so great for these scams. Because if you're a crypto person, you're like, come on, it's not crypto's fault. But the thing is, if you send some tether to someone who you think is a pretty girl, but is actually a victim of human trafficking in Cambodia, you zap them a million tethers, that money is gone. and you don't have any clues, you don't have any address or any name. It used to be like for a Nigerian email scam, they would often work with money mules in the US who would let the con men use their bank accounts. So that would at least give law enforcement something to go off of.