FBI TO RAMP UP EFFORTS AGAINST CRYPTO FRAUD & SCAMS! FRANKLIN TEMPLETON'S NEW BITCOIN ETFS!

**Tony Edward** (0:05)
Hey folks, welcome into The Thinking Crypto Podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. I'm your host Tony Edward. On your way in, please hit that subscribe button as well as the thumbs up button and leave a comment below. If you're listening on a podcast platform such as Spotify or Apple, please leave a five-star rating and review.
All right, folks, first up, the FBI director Kash Patel today tweeted out a video highlighting crypto scams and frauds, and he stated the following, Crypto fraudsters have been scamming and taking advantage of the American people for too long. No more. This FBI will find you and we will bring you to justice.
So it seems like the FBI is about to ramp up their efforts around crypto frauds, which is good. Regardless of if you're a fan of Kash Patel or not, or what's happening under the Trump administration, I think this is very good because we need to make sure we are stopping the bad actors who are taking advantage of people who may not be fully educated about the technology. There's a lot of rug pulls, a lot of scam tokens, meme coins, a lot of them are scams. So this is good. We need to make sure that we are doing the best that we can to protect investors. Now, the timing is interesting because obviously, the Clarity Act is at the cusp of potentially being passed. Even if it doesn't happen within the next month and a half or so, I think we are seeing a lot of institutions are building out their crypto services. So crypto is becoming more prominent, more mainstream. It's become ubiquitous. It's appearing everywhere. So I think it's important for the FBI to do their job here and start ramping up their efforts to get things done. Now, you should see the community notes under this tweet because it's highlighting Donald Trump's meme coin, Melania's meme coin and the other crypto companies attached to Donald Trump like World Liberty Financial and more.
Now I don't think Donald Trump launched a token just to scam people. I think it was a bad decision. I've been seeing it from day one. No president, no politician, elected a politician should have something like that and let alone the first lady, right? It's nonsense, horrible optics, as I've said from day one.
I don't actually mind his sons like Eric Trump and Donald Junior having American Bitcoin because that's a mining operation. You actually have to put the work in to earn the tokens versus just, you know, minting a whole bunch of tokens and doing any types of scam stuff like meme coins, right?
So you know, a lot of people are roasting Kash Patel a bit here. And this is where I said from a while ago, I wish Donald Trump didn't do this because it takes away from the other great things he did for crypto, you know, getting Gary against their fire, pushing to get these government agencies to collectively come together and put together rules for crypto, pushing to get the Genius Act done, all these great things getting overshadowed by his meme coin, his wife's meme coin.
So he didn't do himself any services here. But again, regardless of which political party you're affiliated with, this is very good that the FBI is ramping up their efforts going after crypto fraudsters. And I think they may be seeing what's on the horizon. You get the Clarity Act passed. You get a whole bunch of crypto adoption and innovation, more people investing. So you got to make sure you protect the investors. Now, speaking of scams, Microsoft found malware that hijacks crypto wallets and spreads through USB sticks. So folks, we always have to be careful. I always tell you guys, don't trust, verify. You see an unfamiliar website or link. You get a fishy email. You always got to make sure you check and double check these emails. It may come from an exchange, but it may be a hacker fishing, having a perfectly copied version of that email or website. Always, always be careful and double check everything. So let me give you the details. Malware that spreads via USB sticks has been infecting Windows personal computers and targeting crypto wallets since February, Microsoft sent in a blog post. The firm calls the malware a crypto clipper, and its defender anti-virus identifies it as Trojan Win32 slash crypto bandits. The process starts with an infected USB drive containing a malicious shortcut or link or file. In Windows, shortcut filenames end in.inc or what looks like 1nk and direct the operating system to open a specific program, folder or file stored elsewhere on your computer. When a user plugs in that drive and clicks the shortcut, a type of malware known as a worm is installed onto the PC. Once installed, it does two things. It constantly runs the actual crypto wallet stealing code and simultaneously waits for a new clean USB to be plugged into the same PC.