Most individual scams are so small that the authorities don’t bat an eye. Regulators around the world tend to prioritize cases involving lots of money, or violations that seem particularly egregious. Cases involving less than $100,000 tend to get a pass, and buyers have little incentive to chase after fraudsters on their own. Most swindlers simply disappear. The phenomenon is big, growing—and global. Some crypto wolves work alone, others in packs, and almost all use online aliases. Even people who are in on the same scam don’t necessarily know their accomplices true identities.

“You can’t draw blood from a stone,” Paul Sibenik, lead case manager at CipherBlade, a Blockchain investigation company, says of trying to get your money back. “If there’s nothing left or if the loss wasn’t that high, nailing down the people behind these scams vary case-by-case.”

CipherBlade, founded in 2018, hasn’t taken on any meme-coin scam cases—yet. Sibenik expects business to roll in as more people give meme coins a whirl, lose their shirts or both, and the inevitable lawsuits pile up.

“There is going to be consequences,” Sibenick says, “but it’s not going to happen quick.”

Sibenik goes on: “There’s so much financial opportunity. It’s definitely not a single or even a small group of people.”

Where are they all?

“All over the world, really,” Sibenick says.

The word went out on Twitter: Safetrade was supposedly “rug proof.” The person or persons behind it couldn’t cut and run. An account that promotes meme coins, Crypto Gems, was urging their followers to get in—and get in fast. (Crypto Gems didn’t reply to messages from Bloomberg; whoever is behind it couldn’t be reached.)

It was April 10, a Saturday, and Safetrade was getting buzz across social media. People were saying this looked like the next “it” coin. Robert Turner placed $50 on Safetrade through PancakeSwap, one of the most popular decentralized exchanges for meme coins.

A couple of days later, the rug got pulled. Or at least that’s what Turner thinks happened. He was monitoring Safetrade on Poocoin.com, a scatologically named crypto platform, when the price collapsed to nearly zero in less than a minute. He checked the Safetrade Telegram group. Deleted. Members had been kicked out.

That’s when things got really weird. Minutes later, Turner got a private message from someone on Telegram. The person was offering to help recover his money. All Turner had to do was transfer any remaining tokens from his digital wallet to theirs.

“You need to send the remaining balance of the Safetrade to the burn wallet we will assign you too,” the anonymous user wrote to him. “This is a professional issue, I’m not going to scam you, I’m here to resolve this issue.”

Turner, a 42-year-old software engineer in Melbourne, Australia, smelled trouble. He didn’t do it. Turner says his tokens were worth pennies by that point. But then, pennies can add up. “If he was able to collect enough from various people, they could be worth quite a bit,” he says of the supposed Good Samaritan.

Then there was Mooncharge—what now looks like a “soft rug.” That’s when the creator of a coin project jumps ship and abandons efforts to promote his or her creation. Often, this essentially renders a coin worthless. Turner bought $50 worth of Mooncharge in April after reading about the coin on Reddit. Before long, he was left high and dry. Here’s what happened:

The admin of the Telegram group, presumably Mooncharge’s creator, promised fans in April that he was working on a new version of the coin. “We will keep everyone posted on Mooncharge v2,” the person wrote, using shorthand for Version 2. “Get ready this will be mental.”

“V2?” Moonchargers on Telegram were confounded.

 “Anyone want to tell me what is happening. Have we been scammed?” one asked.

“I’m down $600 from 20-30 minutes ago, what happened,” said another.

By early May, the admin of the group was still insisting Version 2 was on the way. “Stay tuned,” the admin wrote. Then: nothing. As of July 1, no further updates had arrived.

 “The token essentially became worthless after that,” Tuner says. He held on for a bit, hoping that V2 might materialize, and then sold what was left of his Mooncharge. “Everyone still lost their money,” he says.

Ben Ghrist knows all about crypto scams. He’s lives at his parents’ home in Roanoke, Texas, and, for the moment, is trading meme coins as a full-time job. At 35, Ghrist is a millionaire in Safemoon, a billionaire in Kishu Inu and Sanshu Inu and a trillionaire in Keanu Inu. He’s got money in at least 15 different coins, with about a quarter of his $25,000 “portfolio” in Dogecoin, the one created as a joke back in 2013 and known for its Shiba Inu mascot.