Welcome to Let's Talk fin crime, the show where we explore the human side of financial crime. We cover not only big industry trends, but how you truly can protect yourself and your assets. My name is Ted cells, and I'm just one of the hosts for season three. I'm a subject matter expert within the AML Line of Business at nice ACTA Mize, and based in our New York office. Prior to that I was with a larger financial institution out of Chicago for over 10 years implementing AML solutions and processes. for season three, we're doing something a little different. Over our six episodes, you'll hear from a few voices from around nice atomize as we have conversations with some of the most interesting people in the financial world. In today's episode, I'm joined by Gregory Coleman. Greg is the founder and CEO of Coleman worldwide advisors. Coleman worldwide advisors designs and delivers customized, highly interactive, live training related to the detection and prevention of money laundering and suspicious activity reporting. Prior to that, Greg was a special agent for over 25 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigations. During his time with the FBI, he was involved in some of the notable cases, which we'll talk about today. However, his most known case was where he was responsible for the criminal investigation of Jordan Belfort, who is known as The Wolf of Wall Street. With that, Greg, I'd like to welcome you today. And thank you for being part of our session. Hey, Ted, great, thank you for having me. It's pleasure to be here. So you spent most of your time with the FBI. Can you tell me how you originally got involved with the FBI? Sure, it goes it goes back really to 1989 is when I joined the FBI. And prior to that I was involved in the the financial industry in both banking and brokerage, holding various positions after after finishing university, and it was my desire to be involved with Wall Street related cases, investigations and involving Wall Street that I looked to the FBI. What was quite interesting at the time was I didn't even know that the FBI, when I started looking in, say, 1988, I didn't know at the time that they weren't actually even involved in investigating Wall Street related crimes. But my timing was fantastic. When I, when I looked into the FBI, I knew it was something that I would like right away. I mean, I knew it, I just knew my senses told me, it was a perfect match for me and my personality. I ultimately volunteered to go to the New York office hoping to be assigned to a squad that would investigate Wall Street related crimes. And I'm probably one of the the few people who might tie me was just really pretty amazing. I got to do all the things pretty much that I wanted to do during my tenure at the FBI, including working securities fraud type cases and market related cases. So I had a great career just just short of 26 years, 17 years of that doing securities fraud and market manipulation cases. And then, at the end of my career, I got involved with asset forfeiture and money laundering across all programs, rather than just securities programs. So it was a great career went in the blink of an eye and I had the opportunity I would do it all over again. Oh, that's great. It's kind of cool that you actually were part of the industry and look to see that there. You know, there's some issues going on there. And when you join the FBI, your place right into fame crime, so like you said, perfect timing. Yeah. What was interesting is it was at the tail end of the Drexel Burnham, Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky scandals, which by the way, weren't weren't investigated by the FBI. I believe it was the Postal Inspection Service. But but my supervisor of the squad that I ultimately was assigned to was looking forward and recognize that this was an area that law enforcement should be involved and it shouldn't just be an issue that's handled civilly by the Securities and Exchange Commission. And it was in 1992, that they actually formed a squad that was dedicated to doing nothing but Wall Street related crimes. And so I was one of the original founding members of that squad, and I remained there for the next 17 years. So I think it was a smart move by the Bureau it went from a squad of maybe five agents. Were in New York now I believe they have two full squads of Roughly 15 agents, so we're up to probably 30 to 40 agents who are doing nothing but Wall Street related crimes. Wow, that's incredible. Alright, so why don't we get started with one of your more known cases and that's Jordan Belfort Jordan Belfort is known as The Wolf of Wall Street. And I think he actually created the name himself. Self take himself is that when did the investigations on that start? And what were some of the initial tip offs that started the suspicion and later led to the investigations? Well, what's interesting is, as I just said, they formed the squad in 1992. And believe it or not, this was one of the very first first cases that I was ever assigned to work. And what we did was, we were establishing contacts with the Securities and Exchange Commission. And what was at the time, the NASD the National Association of Securities Dealers, which is now called FINRA. And, you know, because they're the market experts, right, they've been doing this for many, many years. And it was a case that the Securities and Exchange Commission they had just brought a case a civil case, against Bill Ford and his firm Stratton Oakmont several months before we formed our squad. And so it was as part of that liaison that they refer to case, I'm not sure if it came directly to the FBI, or was referred to the US Attorney's Office and from there to the FBI. But it was actually because of that case that the SEC had filed that the FBI picked up the case, you know, we looked into the case, it looked clearly like there was violations of federal law there. And we picked up that case. Now, of course, at the time, I was assigned that case, nobody knew how big that case would become, or how notable it would become. But I think it's interesting to say is that there are many cases of this size and notoriety out there, actually, I should say, of this size and importance, but most of them don't get the same kind of attention. So I do want to kind of throw a shout out to other agents, who are working cases as big and as important to the markets, but will probably never get the recognition that I've gotten because of the movie and because of the flamboyance of Belfort. But that's how it all came about. I wish I could say with some great detective, digging on my part, but but sometimes you just get lucky. And in this case, I drew the right card. And it turned out to be a big one. How large Do you remember how large his organization was when you started investigating? Because, you know, obviously watched the movie before we talked again. And he definitely started small and went large. You know, was it fairly small at that time when the investigation started? Or was he well on his way? No, by the time we got involved, he was well on his way. As I mentioned, you know, I came into the bureau in 1989. He set up his firm in 1989. So he was up and running. Remember, we didn't open the cases I just said till 1992. So he had from 1989 until 1992 to perfect his skills and and what he was doing, by the time we got involved, he had what I used to call a pipeline going where he would do a deal every week or every other week, certainly at least once per month. And he would have four or five deals in the pipeline that would they would be working on simultaneously. So the by the time we got involved, of course he wasn't as big as he was at the end. But he was well on his way he was pretty well established. He had a really loyal following by then. He was making millions and millions of dollars every year. And from there it'll go of course it only grew. So when do you think that he actually knew that he was being investigated? And do you believe it really changed any of this behavior? I've seen him talk before and also that he has a confidence about him. Do you think that he was really concerned at that point and did anything differently when he finally found out? Well, what's interesting is I think at the first point where it was actually confirmed for him. If you've seen the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, there's a man in the movie who has a video tog refer and he went when when Bell Ford married his second wife nading they had a very lavish wedding in the Caribbean. I think it was in the Caribbean and they hired this video tog refer and believe it or not, I I got a US Assistant US Attorney to issue a subpoena for the video. And we did send a nondisclosure notice with the with the subpoena. But apparently the video typographer violated that non disclosure and and notified Belfort that he had received the subpoena. And so that's my first recollection of through my discussion. With Belford of him knowing for sure that the FBI was poking around. Now, what's interesting is people ask, Well, why would you want to his wedding video? And it wasn't just for period reasons. I mean, it was for actually very good investigative reasons. If you think about a man in his position is making that kind of money, who is it that's at your wedding, some of your closest associates, and what better way to to get photographs of them for subsequent use and surveillance and things like that, then get his wedding video. And so the whole point of getting that was to really confirm the inner circle and get photographs of the inner circle and, and be able to provide that information to surveillance squads that would go out and later follow these people? Did he change his methods of operation? Well, I think, I think certainly he probably took a whole lot of drugs after the first day. And I think a lot of his drug use was for sort of self medication was, was soothing a conscience that was bothering him, of course, and the fear of getting caught. I don't think he changed his ways as far as the business. I think generally, it's sort of if something doesn't happen right away, then they start to think to themselves, well, they gave up, they went away, and it's not going to be a problem. And they sort of go back to their old ways, right. I don't think he changed his ways very much. After learning that we were involved, although I do know, and this is from discussions, deep briefings of him after his arrest that it really did. It did shake him up, and it shook his wife up nadian quite a bit, when they learned for sure, when it was confirmed that the FBI was investigating them. Did you meet him prior to his arrest on the movie, they show that you're on his yacht and kind of had a conversation back and forth? Did you actually meet up with him prior to and what was that? Like? Was that something where you felt like I just want to take him in now? Or what was that? What was your reaction? Well, the unfortunate part is, I did not meet him before his arrest, contrary to the portrayal in the movie. And I think that's that it really goes to showing how smart Bell Ford was right? Because what Belfort did was when he learned about the FBI investigation, he went on, he hired an attorney who, who immediately came into the FBI and to the US Attorney's Office, and said that he represented Belfort and at that point, you know, based on the law, I was not permitted to go out and approach Belford and have conversations with him since he's represented party. So it was unfortunate for me, because, you know, my theory is if you give me access to him, I would I would have gotten him to cooperate much sooner. But I didn't have that access. And so the first actual encounter was when we arrested him, I'll just address the boat scene very quickly, because personally, I think it's probably the best scene in the movie. And unfortunately, it's based on reality, but it didn't actually happen. Because what happened was Belford was going to bribe me he was going to lower me to his yacht, he was going to have prostitutes there and, and booze and alcohol and everything else. And he was going to try and entice me with his money. But one of his advisors and this comes out in the movie, you hear one of his advisors saying, you know, don't do that it's not going to work, this guy will never take your bribes and you're just going to get jammed up. And so ultimately, he he aborted the plan. But when the screenwriters for the movie learned about it, they they wrote a scene into the script, I read that scene as part of a review of the script before the movie was made. And I suggested to them that they change it to make it more realistic. And we literally and I say we I mean me, Kyle Chandler, and a secondary writer, who actually portrays the second agent in the boat scene. We all sat down in an FBI conference room, and we role played that scene. And, and I have to say, there was some some work by Kyle Chandler, that he that he added on to that thing, and I don't know if they ultimately wrote it into the script after we role played it, or if or if he did it on the fly, but he did a phenomenal job of sort of what I think was capturing my attitude about the whole scenario and the whole investigation about about, you know, if I had gone on the boat that I would have, would have basically taunted Belfort and led him to believe that I was thinking about it and, and I would ultimately stay there until he told me to get off his boat. And, of course, that's how the scene is portrayed in the movie. So I like to think that it's accurate in the sense that if it had had happened. That's the way I would envision it playing out. But the reality of it is it was something that he aborted and and ultimately never took place. But it was based in, in fact. Okay, so you spent about a half a decade on this. So you were you part of the actual rest in what were some of the thoughts going through your mind, I'm assuming that was like one of those days where a lot of celebrations happened afterward. You know, it was very anti climatic, believe it or not, I was not there for the arrest we had, we had gotten some intelligence information that turned out to be wrong, that bell Ford was going to be in a particular location. And as in an abundance of caution, I placed a couple of agents outside his home, in case he got word that we were looking for him at this alternate location. Turns out he was home, he never was at the alternate location. And when he left that location, the agents that I had placed there, stopped him and placed him under arrest. They called me, we came over to his home. I tried to reach his attorney, hoping to keep it quiet, his arrest, keep it quiet, because I wanted to use him proactively in covertly, unfortunately, we couldn't reach his attorney, we had to, we had to process him and put him into the system. In which case, I think the following day, the US Attorney's office released a news release, describing his arrest and the fact that he had been a that he was being held in custody under a $10 million bond, which at the time was the largest white collar crime bond in the Eastern District of New York is what I'm told. So both he and his partner, Danny Porsche were held without bail initially, actually, I shouldn't say without bail under a $10 million bond, which Belford, by the way, produced in three days and in jail. He came up with 10 million within three days and was released. Well, what do you think of his overall punishment? You know, obviously, he had paid restitution. But he only spent 22 months in prison, which is less than half of his four year sentence, which I think the four years sounds a little light. Were you surprised when you saw what was actually given to him? I was I was very surprised. I was very disappointed also, I was I was quite angry about it. Initially, because I look i i understood the gravity of his crime, I had interviewed many victims of his crime. And I thought he deserved more more of a punishment and that he was a very good cooperator. And I think the judge recognized the cooperation aspect. And that's what allowed the judge to depart downward. His sentencing guidelines, were, I think, whole 21 to 27 years, something like that, how in the judge departed downward to four years, he entered the drug and alcohol rehab programs got some additional 15% off for good time. And I think ended up serving 22 months in a camp. So yeah, it was very disappointing. I've literally said that to Belfort himself. It's no secret that I was disappointed. I have spoken to Bill Ford since his arrest. And after the case was completed, I told him that I thought he deserved more time. But at the end of the day, what agents learn is that it's not up to us. It's up to the judges. It's in the hands of the court. And all we can do is our best to get these people investigated, get a good prosecutor to prosecute them. And then it's ultimately up to the judges as to how much time these people will serve. Do I Do I think he deserved 20 years? No, I think that's excessive, but for years is certainly too light. I think certainly somewhere in the seven year range seven to 10 year range would have been appropriate. At the end of the day. It's a $210 million fraud, which by today's standards is not very much but by the standards of the day were pretty high. You said that you spoke to him afterward. Have you spoken to him after he's been out of out of prison at all? Any conversations with him? Yeah, this is actually quite interesting. And people are sort of surprised by this, but I don't want to say I'm in regular contact with him but I probably speak to him every couple of months. actually seen him once or twice. He was running a podcast at some point and worked to get me on that podcast for some time. I I didn't want to go on at first for certain reasons. But ultimately, I thought to myself that I have some things I want to say and I would like to get them committed, you know to video and audio and get My opinions out there about certain things and about the case and, and he offered me a forum to do that. And so I did it. I am a big believer in second chances. Look, I believe that there are some people who are bad and don't deserve second chances and will always be bad. And I also know that there are people who are, you know, basically good people who make big mistakes. I mean, he did what he had to do. You know, the judge sent him to jail, he served his time. There's an issue still floating around about restitution. But again, that's outside of my hands. And it was back at the time, when I was still an agent. There's a lot of political wrangling involved with that. But for the most part, I believe he's somewhat reformed, I don't believe he's engaging in any kind of criminal activity. And, you know, and I always put out there that if I ever learned that he was, I would turn him in one second. Even though that I hope he succeeds in life, I hope he doesn't get into trouble again. I want to make it clear that I still recognize right from wrong, and if he should step over that line. If I were an agent, I would be happy to prosecute him again, or investigate him again, for prosecution, I should should say. But yeah, it's a strange relationship. And, you know, I, one last thing on that sort of subject matters. I have several former defendants in my cases that I'm actually in contact with on a regular basis. And again, because I recognize that sometimes good people just make a mistake, as compared to bad people who who can't be reformed. I don't see any reason not to. I mean, let me clarify that by saying though, you know, they're generally they're not coming to my home, we're not having cookouts. It's not that kind of relationship. You know, there's still mainly except for maybe one or two instances, you know, one or two people, where I actually have personal relationships with them. It's more of a professional relationship. It's a friendly relationship. It's courteous relationship. So I don't see any reason to be any different. I never made these things personal. And I don't think I should now so it's interesting, it's for it leads to some interesting conversations. Very good. I think I'm gonna switch roles here a little bit. So you had talked a little bit about your time with the FBI, and you switched into asset forfeiture where you basically locate and recover funds from criminals. Can you give me an example of one of the larger more interesting seizures that you're involved with? Sure. In 2008, I left the securities fraud squad and went over to the asset forfeiture, slash money laundering squad. And in that role, the there was an agent already assigned to that squad who was the lead agent on the Bernie Madoff investigation that when I say the lead Jaden the lead forfeiture agent, now that the forfeiture role as it relates to those kinds of cases is interesting in that the forfeiture agent has nothing to do with the underlying investigation. They're really there only to attack the assets and acquire the assets that were that are subject to forfeiture and seizure. And so that agent was actually retiring at the time, and I picked up that case. And from 2008 until I retired in 2015. I supported the substantive case agents, through forfeiture by by seizing various assets. And I think one of the sort of the largest and the strangest I believe the amount was $7 billion from one of Bernie Madoff's cronies who hadn't had an account and there were $7 billion in a single account at one of the major banks in New York. And again, the the underlying work for that actual case is not done by the forfeiture agent. My role was to review their evidence and swear out the seizure warrants and then seize the assets. So I always like to point out that as the forfeiture agent, I supported the primary case agents, and they did a phenomenal job in that case is is it related to identifying assets for us to seize? And that was one of the words was most of it wouldn't be recovered with most of our cash for or that type of thing? Or was it a lot of assets that had to be liquidated or Well, by all involve? By the time I got involved, it was mostly accounts it was mostly cashing accounts. Most of the actual hard assets like houses and cars and belongings took place before I joined the case. And I have to say that the asset forfeiture it would be an interesting study because the amount of money that has been returned to victims is really at a record high. Because of the the trustee that was brought in and and the efforts of the Department of Justice and the FBI. They pretty much seized every single asset that this guy had, including, you know, his robes and his slippers and his toothbrush and you name it. It was seized by the FBI, we turn it over to the US Marshals, they conduct auctions and sell it. So his watches, his pianos, his clothing, everything was sold. And all that money goes back, of course to victim investors. So it's an it's an interesting case in that it's probably one of the most comprehensive ones that I was ever involved in the amount of assets that were seized. Going back to Bell Ford for a moment at Stratton Oakmont we, we did something similar. We didn't bother seizing his clothing and things like that. But all of his major bank accounts, for example, the the$10 million that he put up for bail was in the form of jewelry and stocks and accounts and so forth, all of that was forfeited. And all of that went into a victim restitution pool to go back to the investors. So we did the same thing and Stratton Oakmont on us on a slightly smaller scale, we pretty much took every major asset that we could find it still existed at the time. So you spent about 25 years or a little over 25 years with the FBI. Did you enjoy the investigations side of it more? Or was it more of the asset recoveries? Or is it hard to say? Because they're two different very different things? I think definitely the investigation side was the best what I enjoyed about going to that squad. That that did asset forfeiture was when I was on the securities fraud squad. I could bring money laundering cases and money laundering really carried as much passion for me as as doing securities cases, if not more. But when I was on the securities fraud squad, they any money laundering cases had to be securities fraud based, right? It had to be market related. When I went to the asset forfeiture, and I say slash money laundering squad, they could do money laundering cases under any program. And so at the time of my retirement, I mean, I had health care fraud money laundering cases, I was looking at a couple of Mexican drug cartel cases. And so it expanded my ability to do money laundering cases, which is really what I enjoyed the most. But clearly the the investigation part is the best part of the job. It's, I call it the hunt. When you're on the hunt, and you previously asked about the arrest of Belfort, what you'll find in most cases is the excitement of the case tends to decline from that point forward because it becomes more of a prosecution case rather than an FBI case. And it becomes more of the prosecutors show rather than the FBI his work. So, you know, we do more of the work in the beginning, they take over at some point and at the end, it's mostly prosecution. So clearly the what I'll call the fun occurs in the early stages of the case, being able to plan it and think about it and strategize. It really is. It's a fan. It was a fantastic career and, and I really enjoyed it, I would do it all over again. And I'm often so what I'd like to do is kind of talk about your life after the FBI. So I think this might be a very good time for a short break. So why don't we take a quick break and we'll be right back. If fraudster will always try to hide their true location to complies next level location intelligence on mass bad actors by utilizing location data to augment existing risks engines and fraud prevention solutions, increasing protection against account takeovers and by providing the industry's most accurate VPN and proxy detection technology. But to comply, fraud has no place to hide. To learn more, check out www dot geo comply.com. We're back with Gregory Coleman, the CEO and founder of Coleman worldwide advisors. Greg is also the FBI agent who's responsible for leading the investigation into Jordan Belfort who's known as The Wolf of Wall Street. Like I said, I'd like to Get into your life after the FBI, you retired in 2015 and started your own company? Can you tell us a little bit more about that? What's your focus? My focus is pretty much anything investigation or money laundering related. I'll give you an idea of some things that I'm currently working on. I've linked up with the state of Washington. And during the pandemic, virtually every single state in the United States was hit with fraudulent unemployment insurance claims. And it defrauded the states of in some cases, millions of dollars, in other cases, billions of dollars. And Washington State early on, they were one of the first ones sort of, to be criticized for it. And but they've also been the most aggressive in seeking to call back the money. And so I linked up with them. And I'm currently in the process of working with them. And we are using some of their, again, their asset seizure warrants and acid seizure laws that they have in the state of Washington to grab accounts that the banks may be holding on to or, or other monies that are at the banks for people who have completely committed unemployment insurance fraud. We've already we've already filed our first seizure warrant, we brought in an additional $500,000 from bank accounts for the state of Washington, I can tell you, by the time we're done, we'll probably have another 30 to $50 million worth of seizures that will go back to to fund the uninsurance programs. You know, it was defrauded from the program. So I think it's great to see that the state of Washington is is very aggressive about it, rather than just allowing things, you know, the money to go out to be stolen and not do anything about it, they've actually taken a very proactive role in recovering it. I've also doing my time. One of the other things that I really love to do is I do a lot of public speaking at various conferences, and I don't even want to say financial conferences, because I've spoken Believe, believe it or not to farmers, I've spoken to civic groups, I've you know, I have spoken of course to bankers and investment people and Wall Street related people, I do a number of topics I have a very good presentation on, it's sort of my signature presentation on the Wolf of Wall Street, where I talk about aspects of the case that are not in the movie or not talked about in the books, I give people an inside look and take them on a ride through the investigation. From my perspective, I do some presentations on body language and how to use it in business and in your personal life. But basically any topic that involves finance or human behavior and human nature, I can put presentations together for it and tailor them for particular conferences. And in addition, sort of the third area that I do is is training, I love to do training on suspicious activity reporting. And what I like to do is sort of takes people through the process to have them think about things differently. I don't want to just give them information and just have them try and remember it and regurgitate it, I actually try and change the way people think I get them to think like investigators, rather than sort of civilians who are working at a bank or a brokerage firm. And, you know, it's it's a different way of thinking and you look at things differently, and you consider things differently. And I find that very rewarding, because I think, you know, keeping our financial systems clean is quite important. Right? It affects us all. And I find that the people in the industry are grateful to be able to get that sort of insight. Because a lot of what the the banks and the brokerages do is they give give give they produce information produce, but they never get any feedback. And so I provide them that feedback. And I think that's good. I think it's healthy. So when you go into financial institutions in that, are you usually working with larger financial institutions that are trying to like improve the programs? Are you working with smaller institutions that are really trying to establish it and kind of figure out what they're doing? I'll work with any size literally work with any size? I don't I don't I pretty much. When I went into retirement I decided I was just going to take jobs that would be fun and would be challenging. And if it was something that I thought paid very well but would be quite boring and repetitive then I just turned down the turn down the job. So I try and take those that will challenge me I try and take jobs that are that are different. I've got a great network of former colleagues In not even just the the law enforcement world, but in the regulatory markets. So we all sort of bring each other into jobs. I've done, I've been brought in as an expert witness for a unsecured creditors committee who was sowing. I've done a review of SAR programs, but I'll I'll consider any job I look at any of them. And if it's an interesting job, and and I think it would be a good challenge, I'll take it on. If I need to bring in more people. If it's bigger than I can do on my own, then I go to my network of colleagues and bring them in to assist. What do you think is the biggest area for improvement that you're seeing with financial institutions? We have a lot of our listeners or financial institutions or partners with financial institutions, what do you think is the biggest improvement we could do to try and fight crime a little bit or fin crime a little bit better than we're doing today? Well, look, I have to say, for the most part, I think banks, especially banks, let me focus on banks more because this is really where most of the AML and Bank Secrecy Act laws, you know, anti money laundering, AML, and Bank Secrecy Act laws are focused. And that's what you hear you see most of the headlines, I generally think the large banks with with maybe one or two exceptions doing do a pretty good job. They they try very hard and they spend millions of dollars to to do the right thing. And so I've seen a lot of that in these uninsurance and insurance payments. Millions of dollars were stopped by the banks on their own because of their existing filtering and different computer programs that they have in place to monitor transactions. So I do have to give the bank's credit for that. I think some of them have done a great job. On the other hand, I think one of the riskiest areas may be sort of these new areas, these technologically related areas that are coming out of Silicon Valley of these new types of programs. Of course, cryptocurrency, in my opinion, is the riskiest of all, and I think deserves much more regulation. I am not a fan of crypto, I've made it known for a long time that, you know, it's not a product that people invest in, it's your gambling. I even argue in some cases, that it that it really is just smoke and mirrors it's another it's another tulip bulb disaster, waiting to happen, right, referring back to the great scam involving tulip balls. But But cryptos here, and I think unfortunately, you have regulators who are regulating a product that they don't even understand. But nobody wants to be left behind. Everybody has a fear of missing out. And so everybody, every state wants to allow certain aspects of it to occur within their borders. But I just think it's still so much of the Wild West. I think there are just so many claims out there and people speculating and it really is very dangerous, I think. I think the Go ahead. Yeah, I was gonna say What scares me is just how rapid everything is changing around the crypto market, you know, when I started with nice actomyosin, but three years ago, crypto from a financial institution standpoint, it was we don't we don't bank any exchanges, so we really don't care. And it's gone from that to financial institutions offering products, you know, in crypto, and it's just kind of scary in three years, how fast it's moved. And what are we missing in? What are the criminals doing behind the scenes to to kind of play with this whole area? Well, look, my view is that crypto is really the primary purpose for crypto until up until this day, the primary use of crypto was as ransomware for for takeovers of you know, computers and computer systems. And paying at ransomware in the in the second point would be just to speculate it's really like going to the casinos and spinning the wheel or with a racetrack and washing watching the horses. You know, as far as what crypto was designed to do to become a, a an alternative currency to allow you to buy and sell products and conduct commerce. It's virtually non existent. Yes, there's an occasional big story of somebody who sells their home in exchange for crypto, but that's mostly for the headlines. That's mostly propaganda. Because even those companies that came out a while back that said we're going to start accepting cryptocurrencies, for example. overstocks they came out at one point saying they were going to accept cryptocurrencies, well, not really when you when you look behind the scenes what they did was they contracted With a third party exchange, you know, third party exchange would accept the crypto converted into an equivalent amount of dollars and pay a pay the company the dollars, right? They weren't actually putting their inventory at risk by accepting crypto. And until that happens, it's not going to be widely accepted. Yes, Wall Street will monetize anything. Right? If they could find a way to sell tree bark, and make millions of dollars from it, Wall Street would do it. And they would do options and futures on tree bark. And so they would have synthetic tree bark. And they would have, you know, futures based on options based on derivatives based on and that's what's happening with crypto, and it's very dangerous and and I think these 20 $30,000 movements in the price are going to shake a lot of people out of this, eventually, a lot of wealth is being transferred right now. I'm still thinking back to my my time when I was going to buy one Bitcoin for $350. Just to say I had one. Yeah. And yeah, that would have been the right move, of course, and I think they look, if somebody comes up, you know, has $5,000 floating around in their pocket, and they want to go out and they want to speculate on it, that's fine. As long as you understand that what you're doing is speculating, but don't call it an investment. It's not an investment. It doesn't meet the definition of what an investment is. I mean, it's speculation. And if that's what you want to do, that's fine Look, when the casinos were closed, or in COVID. If you wanted to take your money and deal in crypto instead then more power to you. And and have people made fortunes playing it. Absolutely. But remember, there's also for every person that's buying it. At the top, there's somebody selling right, and I think the thing that has kept it alive is that it's so spread out amongst so many people because you can you can break Bitcoin down into the smaller and smaller and smaller pieces. And so you have people putting in $100 $200 You know, it's not like if you want to buy one share of Tesla, you need to come up with $1,000 per share, right? If you only have $500 You can buy portions of a Bitcoin or one of the other coins. I mean, look, Dogecoin is the best example of how crazy this thing is. It was designed as a joke, right? And it's taken off and now you got chibi new coins. I mean, it's getting crazy. And people, I think forget that. What goes up can come down. Exactly. Well, Greg, I think we're at time for today. And I want to thank you for joining me. And I hope those of you that are listening found the content is interesting as I have. I want to thank everyone again for listening. And please don't forget to subscribe. If you have an idea for a show, we'd love to hear from you just drop us a line at podcast at nice actomyosin calm. Greg, if we have some listeners that want to contact you, how do they go about doing that? Sure, two ways. I'll actually give out my phone number and email. These are my business numbers. So they're they're actually publicly disseminated. They can reach me or by texting me at 646-660-1010. Or they can email me at my name Gregory Coleman 2015, which is the year I retired. So Gregory Coleman 201 five@gmail.com. It may take me some time to respond. But I generally try to respond to everybody. So I encourage people to do that or go through LinkedIn. I can also be reached through LinkedIn. And you can correspond with me that way. Great. Thank you very much again, Greg. For everyone listening. Don't forget we do have bonus content for every episode available at optimize.nice.com/podcast. And that applies to this episode as well. Greg, I want to thank you again for being with us and we'll see everyone on the next episode of Let's type in crime