By Thomas Goldsmith
Cross a social media influencer with someone who touts a great new cyber-based way to grow your money and you might just have run into a “finfluencer.”
Financial regulators increasingly use the newish term to designate unscrupulous people — some celebrities, some simply uncredentialed know-it-alls — who pop up online with too-good-to-be-true investment schemes. Often these involve terms such as Bitcoin and NFTs, or nonfungible tokens. Actor Matt Damon has hawked Bitcoin, although, with a recent market downturn in the value of the currency, his ad has disappeared from online. Or remember First Lady Melania Trump and the digital image of herself she marketed as an NFT?
A key term that might tell older investors something about the dizzying nature of all this is DeFi, or “decentralized finance,” structures where people or companies can make transactions directly with each other via software. That’s as opposed to investing via TradFi, or traditional financial institutions such as banks and brokerages.
In North Carolina, John Maron’s job includes letting people know about the potential pitfalls of these kinds of offerings. He’s the director of a program that protects and educates investors with the NC Department of the Secretary of State securities division. Maron was one of two panelists for a recent online information session presented by the Institute for the Fiduciary Standard, an independent national think…
