You wouldn’t be way off to mistake Ray Trapani for a poor imitation of a Goodfellas character. “Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to be a criminal,” he says by way of introduction to his brazen scammery in the new Netflix documentary Bitconned.
When you learn the true story of the sheer illegality Trapani and his former associates got up to, convincing investors to part with money under the guise of bitcoin smoke and mirrors, it’s hard to believe they got away with their Centra Tech scheme for as long as they did.
It’s equally shocking, although not particularly investigated in Bitconned (given the cameras were largely trained on Trapani as he spun his yarn of what went down), that there appears to have been a widespread lack of systemic safeguards to protect against a shakedown like this.
DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather faced repercussions for publicly endorsing what is now clearly a scam, including bogus LinkedIn profiles, a Photoshop product, phoney apps and a fake CEO, who they killed off in a fake car crash. But what about the man who co-founded the entire Centra Tech house of cards and sat down with Netflix to tell the tale?
Where is Ray Trapani now?
The closing scenes of Bitconned tell how Trapani avoided jail time for the scheme after he was arrested in 2018. Facing down the barrel of 100+ years behind bars, Trapani was instead sentenced to time served and a supervised release of three years after he cooperated with the federal authorities.
We also learn that Trapani has got hitched, had a sprog and bought a house since the collapse of Centra Tech. Some questions are posed by the documentarians about how exactly he afforded to buy said house, with no real answers given.
Since the release of Bitconned, Trapani has been fairly active online, taking to his X/Twitter account – where he’s Twitter Blue verified – to ask viewers to shoot any follow-up questions on the documentary his way.
Among the questions he answered, Trapani said he wasn’t paid by Netflix for the documentary and claimed it was “untrue” he was setting up a new loan company, as is stated at the end of the programme.
When one follower asked what he’s doing now, Trapani said he’s “almost done” with a book and a podcast. He added: “This doc only scratches the surface. Hard to cut 100s of hours of film into 1.5 hours.”
He also said he wouldn’t be averse to a Wolf of Wall Street-style film adaptation of his scamming tale based on his book but noted: “Big publishers are a little wary with giving book deals to former criminals.”
He was also asked why he didn’t cash out and flee the country when the Centra Tech truth started to unravel, to which he said: “Common question, but even in hindsight I would never do this. Find one guy running from the FBI that looks happy or sane.”
Bitconned is available to stream on Netflix.
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