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By David Yaffe-Bellany
David Yaffe-Bellany, who covers the cryptocurrency industry, reported this article from Las Vegas and Atlanta.
With its streamlined curves and glow-in-the-dark sound system, the silver Lamborghini Huracán Performante was the stuff of teenage fantasy: $350,000 of aerodynamic metals and lightweight upholstery, packed into a taut and powerful body. Ben Armstrong loved it dearly.
When he first bought a Lamborghini, Armstrong, a crypto evangelist with more than a million subscribers on YouTube, worried he’d have to spend months searching. “I think I want to go to Italy to get the Lambo I want,” he texted. a business partner. ” I don’t want to make concessions. ” But fate smiled on him. In the fall of 2021, a car dealership in Charlotte, North Carolina, sent Hurricane to Mr. Armstrong in a suburb of Atlanta.
As the Lamborghini pulled out of a delivery truck, Mr. Armstrong, better known as the cryptocurrency BitBoy, let out a satisfied laugh. “I possibly would have shed a tear,” he said at the time.
At the time, BitBoy was one of the most popular figures in the wild and scammer-like world of crypto influencers. Cultivating an outspoken and ordinary personality, he filmed a live broadcast five days a week in which he taught his thousands of listeners the virtues of the experimental. pieces with names like Polkadot or XRP. He said regulators were dumb and that virtual currency presented a path to upward mobility. The Lamborghini is shining proof of this: cryptocurrencies would make you rich, cool, and prosperous.
Two years later, Armstrong, 41, lost his production company and much of his wealth. His friends opposed him, and his wife filed for divorce. Over the past five months, in countless social media posts and videos, Armstrong claimed to be the victim of a “criminal conspiracy” through “terrorists” taking over his YouTube channel. “BitBoy is dead,” he said recently.
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