The scam that stole its own script from "Squid Game"

We closed week 7 with a story that has the most perfect irony of this whole series so far: a crypto scam inspired by a series about desperate people being tricked... ended up, literally, with desperate people being tricked.

October 2021. "Squid Game" had just become Netflix’s global phenomenon— the story of people with debts and financial problems competing in deadly children’s games for a prize of millions of dollars. Amid all that worldwide frenzy, a token called SQUID appeared, promising to be the gateway to a "play-to-earn" (play and earn) video game directly inspired by the series: you bought the token, played, and earned more tokens exchangeable for real money.

The project had absolutely no official affiliation with Netflix or with the series’ creators. And there were warning signs everywhere—if someone had stopped to look calmly, the very website was full of spelling errors, and from the start there was a technical detail that should have triggered every alarm: investors could buy the token, but they couldn’t sell it. In the crypto world, that kind of restriction is almost always the digital fingerprint of a scam preparing itself.

But the fever for everything related to the series was stronger than caution. Within days, the token price skyrocketed out of control: according to different reports, between 40,000% and 75,000% in just a few weeks, reaching a price above $2,800 per token, when it had started out worth pennies.

On November 1, 2021, everything collapsed in minutes. The project’s creators abruptly withdrew all liquidity; the project’s website and social media accounts vanished without a trace; and a wallet linked to them had withdrawn the equivalent of almost $3 million just before the collapse, moving the money through services that make tracing difficult. The token price fell from thousands of dollars to fractions of a cent within minutes. A streamer broadcasting live at that moment watched, in front of thousands of viewers, the savings he’d invested go to zero right before his own eyes.

In total, it is estimated that between $2 million and $3.3 million in real investors’ money disappeared along with the project’s creators, who to this day still have not been publicly identified.

The unbelievable part didn’t end there. When the series’ second season arrived in 2024, with all the renewed wave of popularity it brought, new tokens “inspired by Squid Game” began appearing, promising the same thing as the original. The crypto community, with perhaps a pretty short memory, again showed interest in several of them, even though the 2021 story was still available just by searching for it on the internet.

What most leaves me thinking about this story, closing out these seven weeks of the series, is how perfectly the metaphor fits without anyone having planned it that way: a fiction about vulnerable people lured by the promise of easy money, only to lose everything under rules they didn’t control—ended up, in real life, generating exactly the same pattern, with real money and no script of any kind to make it reversible at the end of the episode.

So what do you think—the blame was entirely on the scammers who designed the trap, or did the investors have to suspect as soon as they saw they couldn’t sell the token?

With this, we wrap up week 7 of Our Unbelievable Crypto Universe. Twenty-one stories told, and this ecosystem—among frauds, human errors, and bizarre twists—still hasn’t run out of material. See you next week.