The history of Web Financial Fraud

Web 1.0: Identity

When the web first started early 1990s - 2001 or so the anonymity offered by the newness of the platform and protocol allowed people to deceive others about their identity to conduct fraud i.e. email fraud, website fraud, payment fraud.  This level was mostly at the individual or small group of individuals in a company

Web 2.0: Data

After the dotcom crash and then the rise of social media as the predominant form of generating web content and the demise of the weird internet (i.e. geocities webrings and other cool and personal non corporate websites in regular use).  Large corporations consolidated and aggrandized their control over the web MySpace (died), Facebook, Google, Youtube, Instagram, etc.

These corporate entities then began to engage in data fraud over their vast sums of aggregated data (provided them for the most part freely by their social media users).  Google web ads, Facebook ads of all types (video, data, targeted) etc.  The common point here is that these corporations began manipulating the internal data fraudulently to increase the price of their services.  Google web ads are bid against their own search with no oversight or third party regulator.  Facebook ads are hidden and exaggerated by counting click or hovering the same as going to the outside website or viewing the entire ad and this doesn't even go into the painstakingly obvious process of ignoring bot traffic in order to justify conversion rates and prices.  This process continues, but is fought amongst the largest of data collectors and brokers which is only a handful so in actuality the data fraud is seen as inherent to the rules of the system now.

Web 3.0: Securities

Now we are on the latest type of fraud meant to let the individual or smaller player again back into using the web for fraudulent uses again.  This is noticeable built on Bitcoin, Non Fungible Tokens, etc.  The distributed ledger that is going to allow for anyone to grab a piece of it and then become an integral part of the chain of all commerce going forward.  In reality the big players have already taken control (brokerages and now with the proof of stake it is practically dead) as the ledger is bypassed for the most part allowing larger organizations to control the transactions and therefore set the prices and control the translation of the commodities into others.  This is fraud in that the price of the goods is built from the trading or lack of trading that occurs and as such trading brings it under the securities level of fraud in that numerous manipulations are done to avoid finding the complete market availability and prices i.e. securities fraud.

As doing so regularly large portions of tokens are misappropriated and stolen without protection as the system itself is merely a re-implementation of the current commerce system except badly, slowly, and automated without checks to allow for rampant stealing.  The selling of the idea that the distributed ledger has value because someone said so is a pyramid scheme where the first acquirer is selling the promise of their initial payouts to each subsequent buyer/trader however it completely depends on always have a large supply of outsiders willing to reinject capital into the system to keep up, however there are only a limited amount of people so eventually the system is doomed to collapse as a commodity.

Bitcoin itself should be thought of as art and treated like paintings.  They have a high value to the collector, but provide no tangible benefits other than the expression of human creativity.