‘Crypto really preys on men’: Why former OC star Ben McKenzie won’t quit his crusade against digital currencies

As an actor best known for his roles on The O.C. and Gotham, Ben McKenzie considers himself a professional liar, a skill that he says makes him good at spotting deception. When a wave of cryptocurrency hype and celebrity-studded commercials arrived in 2021, McKenzie’s radar went up, and he dusted off his undergraduate economics degree and started doing research. His conclusions about the industry were blunt: McKenzie considers crypto a Ponzi scheme , a “generational hallucination” and a “quasi-cult.” He has since become one of America’s most- outspoken critics of crypto and published the book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, with journalist Jacob Silverman in 2023. Now he’s tackling the topic in his directorial debut, a documentary titled Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, which explores the rise and fall of platforms such as FTX and Celsius Network and reveals the machinery behind the hype and speculation used to promote digital currencies to everyday people. The Financial Post spoke with McKenzie about his views on crypto, who’s really making (and losing) money off it and why victims of scams are often still believers.

FP: You started researching cryptocurrency during the height of the pandemic. Was there a particular moment that galvanized you to become a crypto critic?

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BM: My friend Dave told me I should buy cryptocurrency. Many people have that friend in their lives that they love dearly, but they would never take financial advice from. For me, that’s Dave. I asked him, “Dave, I’m not going to invest, but what is it?” And he really couldn’t describe what it was accurately.

I just became fascinated by it. In the movie, we also use the Matt Damon ad (for Crypto.com) as the inciting incident, if you will. I was pretty frustrated by the celebrities selling this stuff. That was the height of the crypto celebrity shilling in 2021.

And I just felt like, well, look, maybe I don’t know that much about crypto yet, but these people certainly don’t know anything about it. And it motivated me to look into it a little further. And once I started looking into it, I really couldn’t stop.

FP: The documentary explores how crypto emerged because of distrust in the conventional financial system. How does crypto fill that void, and why is it so appealing to some people?

BM: The crypto story is relatively straightforward. The regulated financial system sucks, it’s deeply unfair, and it’s often an insiders’ game. The rich tend to get richer, and many people have trouble getting ahead. The Bitcoin people will say the solution to this flawed system is crypto, which they claim is a more democratic, more decentralized form of currency.