In early August 2020, a cryptocurrency investor got an email from his sales representative at Cred, the crypto lending firm he’d invested a few Bitcoin in several months earlier. The sales rep was offering a tantalizing new deal: Cred would pay its bigger clients “interest in-kind” at hefty 9% rates on their Bitcoin investments, but only for a limited amount of time—and for a limited number of clients willing to shell out cryptocurrency worth six figures in U.S. dollars.
The investor, an airline pilot who asked to be identified only as “D,” had been burned by high-yield crypto offers in the past; he had even lost money to BitConnect, a meme-spawning cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme. But D saw Cred as a, well, credible opportunity.
