Most celebrities who got near crypto in the early 2020s took the bag. Ben McKenzie took notes instead. The actor best known for The O.C., Southland, and Gotham has spent the last five years deep inside one of the biggest financial frauds of a generation—writing a book, testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, and now releasing a documentary called Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, which includes interviews with two CEOs who are currently in prison.
On the latest episode of VICE Culture Club, host Jackson Garrett sits down with McKenzie to walk through all of it, and the conversation is about as far from a Hollywood press junket as you can get.
The obsession started during the pandemic, when McKenzie’s economics degree from the University of Virginia suddenly felt relevant again. A friend pushed him toward Bitcoin. McKenzie pushed back, then got curious, then couldn’t stop. “Crypto had that, like, in abundance,” he says, describing his love of what he calls “stupid crime”—fraud committed in public, in broad daylight, by people who turn on each other. His first day of filming was at South by Southwest in 2022, where he walked up to Alex Mashinsky, CEO of Celsius, completely cold. Mashinsky is now in jail. “I was like, well, I should probably keep going,” McKenzie says.
And he did keep going—straight to El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele had declared Bitcoin legal tender, promised a volcano-powered Bitcoin City, and the crypto internet was full of footage suggesting it was actually working. McKenzie went to check. What he found was a fishing village, a displaced community, and a market full of vendors who looked at him like he was an idiot. “We need dollars. We need cash. Nobody would take it.” A few months later, he’s sitting across from Sam Bankman-Fried—at the time, one of the hundred wealthiest people in the world—and asks him point-blank what crypto is actually good for. Bankman-Fried says remittances. “I was like, bullshit,” McKenzie says. “I just went there.”
His overall verdict on crypto doesn’t leave much room for argument. “Crypto can only do two things,” he says. “You can gamble with it, or you can commit crime with it.” He’s not impressed by the blockchain-as-ledger defense either, calling it “an insult to our intelligence.” He cites a crypto industry estimate of $150 billion in criminal activity facilitated by crypto in 2025 alone—and notes, pointedly, that the number comes from a crypto company, so it’s probably low.
Garrett also plays “Steal That NFT” with McKenzie, and the pair gets into meme coins, rug pulls, the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto, and former NYC Mayor Eric Adams’s crypto side hustle. McKenzie is funny throughout, angry underneath all of it, and clear about who got hurt. Watch the full VICE Culture Club episode to hear why the actor who could have made real money shilling on a Super Bowl commercial decided to do this instead.
The post Ben McKenzie Left the O.C. and Spent Five Years Exposing Crypto’s Biggest Scams appeared first on VICE.
