Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - INTERVIEW: Centra Tech with Jacob Rensel

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Jacob Rensel was a hopeful investor looking to secure his financial future when he poured his savings into Centra Tech. The pitch was irresistible: a crypto debit card, big-name celebrity endorsements, and promises of explosive growth. But when cracks began to show, Jacob found himself staring down one of the most notorious scams in cryptocurrency history. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. For ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House+ on Apple Podcasts. Don’t miss out on all things Scams, Money, & Murder! Instagram: @Crimehouse TikTok: @Crimehouse Facebook: @crimehousestudios X: @crimehousemedia YouTube: @crimehousestudios To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey there, it's Nicole Labman, host of the Crimehouse Original scams, money, and murder. If you are loving this show, you don't want to miss our fellow crimehouse original podcast, conspiracy theories, cults, and crimes. Every Wednesday, you'll get to explore the true stories behind the world's most shocking crimes, deadly ideologies, and secret plots, from mass suicides and political assassinations to secret government experiments and UFO cults. Follow conspiracy theories, cults, and crimes now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen. And for ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. This is Crimehouse. Well, they were claiming that they had a working debit card that you could put your money into, and they were

saying that they had all these different backers. And ultimately, that in and of itself is a fraud because you're lying in order to get people to invest into something. I was obsessed with taking these guys down. They had angered me so much that I was looking at taking them down as much as I could. As they say, money makes the world go round. What many don't talk about is the time it made people's worlds come to a screeching halt. Whether it's greed, desperation, or a thirst for power, money can make even the most unassuming people do unthinkable things. And sometimes, those acts can be deadly.

This is Scams, Money, and Murder, a crimehouse original. I'm your host, Nicole Lapin. Every Thursday, we alternate between covering infamous money-motivated crimes and gripping interviews with. the experts or those who were directly involved themselves. Crime House exists because of you. Please rate, review, and follow scams, money, and murder wherever you get your podcasts. And for early ad-free access and bonus content, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus on Apple Podcasts.

That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs. No matter the stage of business you're in, visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager. Cendra Tech was a company that promised you revolutionize the way people used cryptocurrency. They claim to be developing a debit card and a digital wallet, that would allow users to spend their crypto almost anywhere that Visa or MasterCard was taken.

They boasted partnerships with major financial players like Bank Corp, Visa, and MasterCard, and even secured endorsements from high-profile celebrities like Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khalid, creating an illusion of legitimacy and success. To a new investor like Jacob Renzell, this all sounded incredibly promising. The company's white paper promised impressive returns, And with celebrities lending their credibility, the project seemed like a sure bet. But what was being sold as a groundbreaking technology was actually a total sham. Jacob, thank you so much for joining us.

I appreciate that. How are you? I'm doing well. The bigger question is, how are you? I can't complain. Life has changed a lot, obviously, and I've been doing pretty well. So before all this centred tech, what was your philosophy on investing? particularly in emerging or high growth sectors. Basically non-existent. I was just a 20-year-old. You know, you know all the basics, you know, invest in your 401k, try to put away 10% if you can, which never really happened because you're young and you just want to go out and have a good time. So before CentroTech, absolutely zero experience.

And you are a war veteran. Yeah. How did your experience in the service shape your financial outlook? Did you approach risk differently? Did you think about financial security in a particular way because of your service? That's a great question, first of all, and I appreciate that. I would say it was more midway through my career that I actually started to take a serious look at my finances. And it was after going to Afghanistan and experiencing some of those things and trying to assess where I was going with my own life and taking a holistic look. at everything. But I would say probably midway after Afghanistan and some of the things that we saw out there is when I started taking things seriously, more seriously, if you will. I can only

imagine. Do you feel like that experience or some of the existential moments you had during your time there, I assume, made you more or less conservative financially? In terms of risk, I would say that it actually did not have a impact in terms of my risk profile. I think it made me take a more serious look at what was I doing and how was I taking my life seriously because others were not coming back. That weighs heavy on you. If you continue your life and others are not, well, then maybe you should take it seriously. So in terms of risk, I would say it didn't have necessarily a determination. More of what I felt and thought about was, how old am I? And what kind of risk profile does that afford me because I'm young and I'm able to make riskier choices? So you came back and you wanted to take it seriously. And at this time, you're in your 20s.

Yes. And so you have a long time horizon. So you can potentially get more risky. Had you actively invested in crypto or anything highly risky before? No, no, absolutely not. It got in around 2016, 2017, and didn't hear about it until around that time frame. And I know that it was an emerging field. So it wasn't something that I was necessarily familiar with. So when did you become familiar with Centra Tech? How did you first encounter then?

one day we were in the shop, in the military, and this is actually a group effort. So I was working with a couple of friends trying to figure out how can we get invested and think about making money. I was on Yahoo.com on some of those investor forums. And Ethereum popped across to some kind of emerging financial tech that was coming out. And the way that I actually fell into Centrotech is because I started doing a lot of research into Bitcoin and Ethereum because of Yahoo.com's posting. And I ended up into a Bitcoin forum. And I started researching different coins. And that's where most of all of the ICOs were posted, was on this forum. What specifically then drew you to Centrotech? Were there features or promises around

the card or the wallet that convinced you that this company was groundbreaking? Well, I thought if I'm going to have all this cryptocurrency that I'm going to be purchasing, which I was at the time purchasing Bitcoin, Ethereum, all these different coins, we were running into an issue of how do you actually spend those coins without having to go through a centralized exchange and off-ramping that to some form of fiat or into dollars. And when I was reading through the forums, we saw a debit card that was attached to this coin called Centra token. and it was purportedly trying to explain that it was a debit card for crypto. And I thought that was a great idea.

I thought that was really smart. And so I took a closer look and interest into that. And what did you find? Well, I found that they said they were backed by Bancorp Visa MasterCard. And they had a lot of statements saying that they were going to be the number one debit card on the market and that they had all these institutional backing. from all these different players. So here you are, Jacob, back from Afghanistan, in your 20s, getting really serious about investing. You start looking on Yahoo Finance, I presume, for the

ICOs, which are initial coin offerings, kind of like IPOs in the traditional stock market. Then you say, okay, I'm going to really get serious about Bitcoin, Ethereum, some of the bigger coins, but I want to be able to buy things. And I found this company called Centric card and Centra Wallet. Then you found Centrotech and you think this could be a great fit for you to buy things on a regular basis from your crypto investing. That all fits. Additionally, with the Centrotech card, they were also explaining that you were going to get paid dividends for card usage, right? Because we know that MasterCard, Visa, Amex, all these different card providers, they have transaction. How they get paid is through the transaction fees with

the merchants. And so that was going to be the same idea. right and that's also how you get dragged into the center token because it's it's not just the central card it's also the token which is supposed to be the cryptocurrency behind it and once you went and got the card you'd be purchasing the tokens themselves as well you'd be paid out a dividend based upon what you were holding so much like a staking with ethereum how you get paid based on network usage things of that nature and you sign up originally for the card only yeah I think I purchased maybe a couple thousand dollars worth because I didn't have a lot of money and I certainly signed up for their ICO at the very beginning.

That initial coin offering had different tiers and different cards associated with them. So I could afford the lowest tier card at that time and that I did do that initial coin offering early on. So you get the card, you get the coin. you see there's a lot of high-profile celebrities involved in this thing, right? Floyd Mayweather Jr., DJ Khalid. Is this influencing your decision-making process to invest in this? So at the time, right before all of that really kicked off, I was already pretty much bought into it. DJ Khalid and Floyd Mayweather happened pretty much right up to the ICO coming on. And that card additionally hadn't actually been even delivered to me. I never actually received a card.

And so I had already been in before that, but there was certainly a lot of hype leading up to that point. The valuation of that token itself kind of skyrocketed as well as they were starting to promote that through DJ Calid, Floyd Mayweather, and looking at other opportunities as well. So the endorsement that they gave leading up to the ICO, do you think that gave an added layer of credibility for you, for the company, and also all of the partnerships that they said they had with the credit card companies and banks? Yeah, I think at that time when you're that young, and I'm trying to put myself in that mindset, because today it would be a different story. But putting myself back in that timeframe, I would say that it was maybe not as much

credibility, but more hype, if that makes sense. It's more about how many eyes are getting on something. Because around that time is when I was starting to really get deep into what was going on with the whole company itself. And I knew that DJ Cow and Floyd Mayweather was going to increase the value of the token or at least get more people invested into it, which would then raise the price of the token itself as well. But you're not suspicious. Generally, no. How much money do you invest in CentroTech? It was around, I think, about $4,700 in total. For me, that felt like everything. I really didn't have anything else to invest at the time.

The golden role of investing is to diversify. Never put all of your eggs in one basket. But Jacob was all in. So what was it about Centra Tech that convinced him to make such an extreme gamble? It came from their white paper, right? I looked at the math and that they were purporting. You're going to get paid out a certain amount of diminutive. based upon how many coins you have and how much of the max supply there was going to be and how much

usage that they said the card would get, right? It's kind of like one of those slide decks where people try to tell you, hey, this is how much money we're going to make. And it was really just a hype deck, if you will. And I bought into it. And that's how I came to the conclusion. I was like, okay, if I invest $4,700 and this is how many tokens I'm going to get, down the road, I could make X amount of dollars, which seemed a good investment at the time. And you started seeing some of that come to fruition. A little bit, yes. When the hype was going up, you know, at one point I think I was sitting upwards of around like $20,000 is what I was sitting at.

And so you were feeling excited, optimistic. Very good. Honestly, I should have sold out. But the high of the moment was definitely hitting. absolutely. Like that was the most amount of money that you ever, ever made. Ever had. Yep, at that time. And so were you making plans based on these perceived games? Like how did this change your personal hopes and dreams and aspirations once you saw this investment for X really quickly? You have that blind optimism, right? Where you just think it's going to keep going. And yeah, you start doing all these things where you think about, well, what's your lifestyle going to be in of the future? and, you know, what am I actually going to put this in if I did sell? And, yeah, absolutely. All of those things ran through my head.

So looking at moving or buying a car or, you know, whatever, a young 21, 20-year-old male is thinking about purchasing at that time. Yeah. So you're not thinking about selling. No, no. You're thinking about the fact that this is going to continue to grow and you're going to potentially open up new opportunities. Yeah. So did you discuss this investment with friends or family? Yeah, I tried to convince other people to get into this token.

I'm glad majority of them did not listen, though, fortunately. What did they say? Well, a lot of people just didn't understand crypto at all, to begin with. So most people were pretty standoffish. That's normal, especially back that. I mean, I know today we're all looking at Bitcoin's high valuation at $118,000. I think is today or 13. And people don't think it's a joke now. But back then, they were very suspicious, except for maybe some close friends who were also in the same space. But nobody took you

up on the idea of investing themselves. No, no. But you were excited. I was. And so at its highest point, what did you think that your investment was worth? Was it the 20? K or did it go higher? It was the 20K, yeah. Did any of your friends or people that you spoke with tell you to maybe take some profits or sell a portion of your investment? Or were you just not hearing anything about that? None of them expressed that, but they're all the same age as I was. So it's kind of the same. You're in your own little echo sphere, right? Like it's all the same thinking. So unfortunately, I didn't have a good mentor that could tell me to take profits at that time. Makes total sense. But you think you found

the next big thing and that this is just going to continue to skyrocket. So you stick with it. Yes. But things began to change in 2017, in part due to an influential investor in the cryptocurrency community, a man named Cliff High. Cliff had played a significant role in Centra Tech's story. Initially, he endorsed the company, believing it to be a reputable project from a financial institution. And his positive recommendation led to an influx of cash for Centra Tech's ICO, or initial

coin offering. But soon, he realized he had made a huge mistake. At the time, Cliff wrote, quote, So sorry to all my readers for the write-up on this company. It was due to data masking from a legit credit union by the same name that has linguistics going back years. End quote. When Cliff set down to interview Centrotech co-founder Sam Sharma, things started to unravel. So how did Jacob feel when he first heard the interview? It was terrible. At that point, I had already kind of been doing what Cliff High was doing, which was kind of poking and prodding and trying to figure out what was going on. When that interview happened, Sam really kind of dropped the ball pretty hard on that

and provided no good information. I mean, the facade was being ripped off in real time, everybody was seeing what was happening. And that interview was just a train wreck. What stood out most to you from the interview? Well, I think a lot of the excuses that Sammer was making at that time. I think at one point in the interview, he said, well, I'm not the tech guy. I don't write the code. And I'm just the visionary who's pulling all the people together. And I remember Cliff just going, okay, guy. And Cliff made an honest mistake by initially giving his blessing on it. Can you explain his influence?

I don't know Cliff High to depth. However, I do know that Cliff High managed some kind of investment newsletter and had a strong following of individuals who really counted on his word for investment advice. And I think he had something to do with some banking back in his early days. And that's how he kind of built his community. And when he found Centrotokin with his webbots, is what he said. He thought it was some kind of bank, the Centra bank, that was creating a debit card. And he was like, oh, wow, this is crazy.

Didn't do the extra research, much like some of us also bought into the FOMO, the fear of missing out, and pushed it out to his following. So the crack start showing with Centra Tech, how do you think the leadership of the company, particularly Sam Sharma did when they were trying to address the spin and the fallout from the interview. They just denied, denied, denied, and just spun it as much as they could. I remember from the Slack channels, Sam was just kind of, this isn't an issue, we're going to move forward, you know, we're answering all the questions, and this is what we're doing, and just kind of ignored the whole problem, which seemingly worked. It was kind of like the 10 second, you know, it's in one ear out the other. And if you didn't see it, then it didn't happen, sort of deal. But beyond the interview, it sounds like there were some little things that started to feel weird to you. What began to feel amiss with the company? I think the first thing that I noticed was when the Bancorp sponsorship was removed from their white paper update. And it was removed off of their website.

And I started asking questions inside of the Slack channel, and they did not like that. How did you even notice that? When you put all your money into something, you become very invested in the emotional aspect of that, right? And I was certainly emotionally tied to my money at that point. And so that means any piece of information I was looking for to find out, okay, is this going up, this is going down, what's happening? So anytime there was a change on their website, on the white paper, I was already on it. I'd seen it, and I was trying to figure out what was going on. Wow. And they also had Visa and MasterCard logos disappear as well.

They did. Those were a little bit later down the road. I believe when someone actually reached out to Visa or MasterCard, they actually ended up taking them off of their white paper and website. But that was towards the end where everything was starting to come down. I believe that was after I had actually started talking to some lawyers and looking at everything. So what motivated you to start actively questioning the operations and the leadership? You're talking about this Slack channel where you're asking what happened to the logo and it didn't go over so well. I mean, you knew that you were going to be at odds with the company, right? But you still did it. I think it was my ego, actually. That put me at odds.

You know, I started asking these questions, which I thought were just normal. Hey, why is this gone? Hey, why aren't you guys answering these questions? what's going on with this interview, and they actually banned me from Slack because I was spreading fear, uncertainty, doubt, which is FUD in the community. Raymond Trapani actually banned me, and that's what set this kind of emotion, everything that would come forward. It was that moment, actually. Did you create FUD? Can you describe the atmosphere or the anxiety level within the Slack channel has these red flags continued to pop up? I would say absolutely that is technically fun,

right? I'm asking a serious question that the founders can't answer. And if they can't answer it, then everybody starts getting fearful because they're like, oh, well, if you can't answer this, what else is going on? And so they started to crack down on dissent in the Slack channels to remove anybody asking questions and keep it to that tight sphere of, you know, everything's going to go up. Everything's going to be great. We're all going to make money. Which seems to only stoke the fear and the uncertainty and the doubt. Were other investors also voicing some of these doubts? Or were you isolated in the concerns that you had? I would say that probably there were other investors, but just like me, they were most likely banned. I did see some people agree with me, but then I never saw them again. And it was mostly a lot of investors who were defending the coin. Anything that they could find to defend it, they would. do that. And then you were approached to specifically stop speaking out. What did they say to you?

I was approached after I'd gotten my lawyer. They tried to pay me in Centra token first. Personally, Sam reached out to me on Facebook, of all places, and offered to pay me to stop attacking the token. Because I was messaging on every board that I could. I was on the Bitcoin Talk Forum, which is where they initially posted their ICO. I was on their YouTube channel. posting, telling people, hey, be careful. I think this might be a scam. I was on all of their platforms posting. And so Sam Sharma actually reached out. And I think he offered me about, I think it was about 25 grand at the time in Central Tokens, which later we found out that this is a tactic that they were using on other people as well. The 25 grand was more than you had. That's a lot of money.

So how did you react to that? Well, because I had actually already been in contact with my lawyer, that wasn't going to happen because that puts the entire proceeding in jeopardy, right? If I was to accept money from the people that we are ultimately suing in a class action lawsuit, that would put everything in kind of a difficult position. And so I wasn't going to accept it. There was no point where I was going to do that. What did it tell you that he offered you that much money or that much money in Centrocoin tell you about the deception or the level of desperation that they were experiencing?

I mean, it definitely shows that they were aware what kind of impact I and the team were having on trying to raise doubts to the coin, myself and others, because they obviously successfully paid off other people to include Cliff High, which was interesting. Well, when did you decide to get a lawyer? What was the catalyst? I was obsessed with taking these guys down. They had angered me so much that I was looking at taking them down as much as I could, collecting. information, right? So I had actually spent a period of time collecting data on the company and individuals looking for all the information that I could, and anything that could prove my point that I was right, that it was a fraud, to the point where I had access to personal details. I figured out pretty early on that Ray Mitropani used his grandfather with a pseudonym to become the new CEO of the company once it killed off Michael Edwards, all these different

things and was putting together all these facts, I was able to get access to their private socials and things of that nature that had no connection directly to the company and started uncovering a whole bunch of information. And what had happened was, I got over it, actually. Once I started gaining access to specific things that I should not have access to, I started to realize, hey, maybe I'm taking this a little too far. And so I actually put it away for a little bit for a couple of weeks. And this isn't in the documentary. This isn't anywhere else. But one day I was just on Google and I got a sponsored advertisement that was directed at people who had searched keywords of Centrotech. And I had searched quite a bit. So I was the perfect target for that

sponsored ad. And it was from a ZLK law firm. They were asking if you had any information and I called them up. And I said, hey, I have all this information. What do you think? And I remember, the partner at the time. I can't remember his name off the top, but he said, you are the perfect person, and this never happens. Nobody comes with all this information. This is just perfect. They thought it was perfect. I mean, so perfect that you became the lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit. How did it feel to be at the forefront of this legal battle representing potentially thousands of other defrauded investors? At the time, you know, I didn't even cross my mind. I was just more, let's take these guys down. I didn't even understand the

gravity until, you know, you start hearing the personal testimonies from some of the affected victims. Some of the conversations that we would have with John Cariel, who was my legal representation at the time, who was running that case. I didn't really understand, you know, I was too young. I was kind of stupid, stupid kid, if you will, still. But that was put into perspective later on. What kind of stories did you start hearing? At the very end, where there were witness testimonies before Sam and the other founders were either found guilty and charged or not. They had all these witness testimonies. And I remember there was a poor woman, she invested her child's entire college fund and lost everything in the token. And that one was

really sad. And she was bawling during the testimony. It was just not. That was terrible. And at this point, did you still have money in Central Tech? No, I was completely out either right before or right after the New York Times posting. So, and I believe that was in October of 2017 is what that was. Do you remember what made you pull your money out? What was the final straw? It was that documentary. It was right as that post, and I was like, okay, there's no way that I'm going to make any money off of this.

There's no way that this is going to be anything going into the future. I was already on the edge. There was a point where I was like, okay, well, maybe I could short the coin and make a whole bunch of money. Maybe there's all these different levers that I could do. But eventually I was just, you know what? I'm just going to pull out and be done. How much was in there at the time? I ended up losing a total of $370. So if I invested about $4,700, it would be roughly $4,400, maybe $4,330, I think. And was the process of getting your money out weird? Were there delays? It was weird. The token was still listed on exchanges, so you could still convert it. But the price of the token was dramatically coming down. So finding buyers during that period of time is difficult because the books, the... Bit an ass. Yes, are moving quickly. So it was hard to fill. But you did? Yes. And you came out relatively unscathed.

Yes. Better than others, of course. In 2013, two brutal murders left the city of Davis, California, paralyzed in fear. The victims were an elderly couple. It was up close and personal. I'm 48-hour correspondent Aaron Moriarty. He's a, I think the word is psychotic. This is 15 inside the Daniel Marsh murders.

Follow and listen to 15 inside the Daniel Marsh murders. murders on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Jacob was one of the lucky ones. He managed to get out before the collapse, escaping with most of his money. But for him, the fight was not over. He became obsessed with exposing the fraud and holding the company's founders accountable. And so he became the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit. So that lasted for, it felt like ever.

We went back and forth. And so in the very beginning, we were working directly with Centrotech's legal counsel. At one point, they actually were going to offer us a settlement privately, where they were going to try and buy us out. But right before that happened, the SEC ended up filing against them as well. And they copied the entire docket that my lawyers had pushed out with a little bit of a amendments and tweaks here and there. But it was the same exact information. And then they charged them as well for securities fraud. So what was the fraud? What was actually going on behind the scenes? Well, they were claiming that they had a working debit card that you could put your money into,

and they were saying that they had all these different backers. And ultimately, that in and of itself is a fraud because you're lying in order to get people to invest into something. Eventually, we would find out later on that they would start this company on a lie, not have any actual technology to go against, to prove that they have anything working, and try to fake it till you make it, essentially. So they never had MasterCard and they never had Visa, and they never had Bank Corp, but they fraudulently used the logos. Correct.

There's some other information that isn't necessarily public, but they were trying at one point in time, I was able to get access to a private. private Skype account. And I could see what Sam Sarma was doing and who he was talking to. And so one point in time, Sam was trying to do a prepaid debit card and try to pass it off as the same card. And then in the back end, trying to reconcile the crypto exchange side with the debit card side. So he was trying to work something on that end. So that's the only time where I've seen him actually have something where maybe he could get that connected, but we never saw anything go into production, not one card. So they didn't have the partnerships, they said,

they didn't have the backing, they said, they didn't have the tech, they said. What of all the fraud do you find most egregious? The most egregious fraud would probably be the footage of like Floyd Mayweather, DJ Khalid using the cards is probably the most flagrant use of fraud because none of that was real. It was all fake. And so it looked like on the surface they had something that worked when truly they had no tech. None of it was there and none of it actually worked. So it was all being faked. The whole thing was a lie. And any footage was just pretend. Yes. I mean, there's no way around it. It is yes, that none of it was working. And they were never able to produce anything that was working. And if they did, they would have produced it in the

lawsuit to prove otherwise, which they did not, because they could not. The legal outcome for the case included sentences for the founder's efforts to create a remission fund. Do you feel like that was justice for you and the other victims of Centrotech? I would say for me, it wasn't necessarily about the money at the end. It was more about making sure that they paid the price, because ultimately, I only lost $370.70. But for others, probably not. I don't believe that they got all of the funds to begin with. I think there's still funds out there. And I don't think people were made whole through the remission process. So all in all, how much did people lose? We could speculate on that because the government sold the $100,000 Ethereum at I think it was either $400 or $40. And we know that today, that same Ethereum is worth.

Should have hung on to it. Yeah, 3,500. So that's hard to say. However, I do know that they raised upwards into the $200 million, right, $250 million. And they only secured $100,000 Ethereum. And at that time, that was $40 million, $50 million, something like that. Where's the rest of the money? Where do you think it is?

I don't want to speculate. But I've heard rumors that some individuals are holding it because we know that a perfect 100,000 Ethereum is not the total sum of what they got. You're going to tell me that they had a cold wallet that had a perfect 100,000 in it. And yet they were running this business, right, which has operations that you have to fund, which has all these different things, and you have to pay for the influencers. There's a whole bunch of different expenses that go with that. So where's the rest of the money? Why didn't they seize any of that or ask for their financials and provide that in the depositions. I think there's a lot more money out there. Who has it? That's the question. And

where is it? That's an even better question. Did you think the suit or the government should have gone after the influencers like Floyd Mayweather or DJ Callet? I think that they ended up doing that more broadly later on. I would have to look back, but I know that others were getting charged because they were not disclosing that they were being paid for those advertisements. And I think that did come later. So what would justice served really look like for you in this situation? If this is not about your $300, this is obviously about the principal. I think that I have to leave that up to the courts to really try to find the best outcome because that's why they're there, right?

I mean, even though Raymond got time served, and I don't necessarily agree with that, and I don't like his sentencing, I have to trust our judicial system. We have to believe that our judicial system stands to serve the people. And I think at the time, this was a kind of a landmark case, right? There was no precedence to this. Yeah, this was pre-FTX. Right, yeah. And, you know, I think everybody was just doing their best to figure out what was going on. It's the same thing.

In the judicial system, they have a lot of different thinking to figure out, well, what does this actually merit to? How much loss was actually suffered and how do we quantify it? That's a great question. I don't think Raymond should have got time, sir. Why not? He was a pretty flagrant character in the whole case, and he ended up being worse than I thought. I didn't necessarily know these three people, and the Netflix documentary actually showed me more information than I anticipated. I knew they were bad. I knew what they were doing was wrong. It's kind of hard to gauge what a person's character is until they start talking, and they start showing their

True Colors. And I think Raymond's character was probably one of the worst. I think that Farkas, Robert, I think that his character was more of someone who just didn't really grasp what was going on necessarily, like maybe not like a bad person, like not trying to go out and screw people over. And he still did, ended up doing a year, right? And Raymond, who, you know, snitched on everybody, which I understand that helped move the case forward, ultimately got time served. And he probably at that time had one of the worst characters. So it sounds like you believe some justice would include time in prison.

Absolutely. After having time to process everything you have gone through with CentroTech, what is the biggest lesson or takeaway you learned from this entire experience? People ask me that question a lot. It changes every time because of what we're seeing currently in today's climate, right? Maybe a couple years ago I would have said, I'll do your research, right? Do more research before you make an investment. I think it's different phases of life changes the way that we feel and think about different things. And I would say today, the biggest lesson is if you're going to make a decision to invest in something that fits your values, make sure you're checking the character of the people. that are involved, right? If I would have checked the character of those three individuals and really taken a look at their backgrounds, I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble. But how do you do that? It's trial and error typically, right? We all have to pay our dues. I think that's what it's called is paying your dues early on and making mistakes and try to make as many

mistakes as you can, but that aren't going to have lasting impacts later on into your life. I made a lot of mistakes, which have led me to the success that I know today, I wouldn't want to change anything, right? And I'm very fortunate to have been able to make those mistakes at the age that I am, or was, and be able to bounce back from that to make better decisions going forward. So the advice today wouldn't be do more research, because you did a ton of research. It would be tried to understand as much as you possibly can about the founders. I think that's a good place to start, right? A CEO is leading an organization, taking a look at their character and the people that they are

and looking at the mission statement of whatever it is that you're trying to invest in. I mean, obviously, some companies are so large that even if you did look at those things, it's not like you're going to understand everything to their day-to-day operations. But like if it's a small group, something that's emergent, I think that character of those individuals is pretty important in understanding, like, where they're coming from and trying to make a speculative decision on the team that's running a company, but probably a better place to start, at least in this scenario that we're talking about right now. So what's your big message in the takeaway from your experience with CentriTech?

What do you want people to know? Why are you talking about this now? I'm talking about it because it's an interesting story. I didn't think I was going to find myself in this position in life, for sure, putting all my money away into one coin and then exposing a fraud. I think the takeaway is really that there are people out there that don't have your best interest in mind and that you should be trying your best to make sure that you don't get screwed over. That somebody doesn't steal what is yours that you worked hard for. Even if somebody does get one over on you, maybe you can catch

them in the act and then take them to court and save the day, hopefully. Jacob, thank you so much for joining us today to tell your story of taking them to court and saving the day. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Nicole. Scams, money, and murder is hosted by me, Nicole Lapin,

and is a Crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. My guest today was Jacob Renzell. Here at Crimehouse, we want to thank each and every one of you for your continued support. If you like what you heard here today, reach out on all social media at Crimehouse. And don't forget to rate, review, and follow Scams, money,

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