Start with the fact we have something called meme coins and the rest starts to make a weird kind of sense

From Matt Novak:

The anonymous hucksters behind a Squid Game cryptocurrency have officially pulled the rug on the project, making off with an estimated $3.38 million. Remember on Friday morning when Gizmodo told you it was an obvious scam? It was only obvious because investors could purchase the crypto but couldn’t sell it. But plenty of people didn’t get the warning in time.

The SQUID cryptocurrency peaked at a price of $2,861 before plummeting to $0 around 5:40 a.m. ET., according to the website CoinMarketCap. This kind of theft, commonly called a “rug pull” by crypto investors, happens when the creators of the crypto quickly cash out their coins for real money, draining the liquidity pool from the exchange.

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But the biggest red flag was that no one who purchased the coin was able to sell. That didn’t stop mainstream news outlets like the BBC, Yahoo News, Business Insider, Fortune, and CNBC from running headlines about how the new Squid Game cryptocurrency had soared by 83,000% over just a few days.