The name of the Netflix streaming film that chronicles the tale of a blockchain-based pyramid Ponzi fraud is “Crypto Boy.”
Shady El-Hamus’ drama film “Crypto Boy,” which was shot in the Netherlands, debuted on Netflix on October 19, 2023. The director’s father and brother, Sabri Saad El-Hamus (Omar) and Shahine El-Hamus (Amir), respectively, play the key parts.
The narrative centres on Amir, a twentysomething guy of Egyptian descent who works at his father Omar’s family restaurant, “Burrito.” Due to the restaurant’s downfall and the astronomical increase in rent, the family’s financial position gets worse.
Amir, who yearns for a change, feels unappreciated by his father, who only delivers food, and hopes for a better future but is never successful in realising his dreams.
The pivotal moment occurs when he attends a talk by Roy, the manager of an investment firm that deals in cryptocurrencies, who makes easy money by investing and trading.
Encouraged by the chances, Amir partners with Roy in business and quickly becomes wealthy and independent. He even wants his father and friends to join this new venture, but Omar is still against it.
Amir’s affluent lifestyle and spectacular events contrast with his father’s hard work maintaining the restaurant. When restoring the restaurant, Omar had an accident, leaving it unfinished.
Amir invests all his savings in the trading platform to support his father, but online reports reveal it is a Ponzi fraud. Amir has many problems when the platform is blocked and money cannot be withdrawn.
He learns that the company he worked for was a hoax after making fruitless attempts to get in touch with Roy and even go out and find him personally in an attempt to retrieve his lost money. The story comes to a happy ending when Amir eventually makes amends with his father and goes back to work in the restaurant, despite all of the challenges.
Expert perspectives on “Crypto Boy”
Experts and the most popular comments on the internet suggest that the movie “Crypto Boy” tells a straight-forward plot with few surprises, mostly focused on a family-owned company.
Nevertheless, in contrast to the director’s last hit, this movie seems sloppy and extremely straightforward, with cliched characters and plot points. Furthermore, the Ponzi scam scheme, which forms the core of the narrative, is not thoroughly examined, remaining surface-level.
In any event, despite the film’s poor technical direction and production value, it offers an intriguing window into the emotions of those who fall prey to deception.
The protagonist and others around him go through a range of emotions, from initial frustration to the false happiness of change to disappointment and sorrow when the system fails and their savings are lost. This is true even if the plot is straightforward.
As a result, the movie might interest industry enthusiasts but bore the general public.
Scams in the cryptocurrency space and investor education
Both in the setting of the movie and in real life, a great deal of people are duped by schemes that offer easy money.
This behaviour, which is especially common in the blockchain space, frequently takes many different shapes. Regretfully, it is becoming more and more common for investors to fund dubious enterprises that turn out to be scams after all.
A couple of recent instances include UEFA and, more recently, the CMG project, which are both frauds that have syphoned off substantial quantities of money from multiple victims.
Therefore, unlike the joyful endings found in most films, real life frequently has unpleasant outcomes and causes large losses for the people concerned.
One way to combat this phenomena is to try to increase public knowledge of these risks by educating and informing consumers about this delicate and complicated subject. In order to stop new frauds in the blockchain sector and to encourage a safer and better-informed investing environment, there is a growing need to concentrate on prevention and raising awareness.
