Ben Armstrong, AKA “BitBoy Crypto,” gained notoriety in the cryptocurrency industry through his YouTube channel which has now reached ~1.44 million subscribers.
BitBoy’s videos contain a variety of sensationalist content, from market commentary to news and interviews with other well-known or controversial people in the space.
Armstrong’s interviews have included HEX founder Richard Heart as well as John McAfee, TRON’s Justin Sun, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, and NBTV’s Naomi Brockwell.
Recently, BitBoy has faced accusations of scamming or misleading his viewers, as multiple pieces of evidence have surfaced suggesting he’s failed to disclose the paid promotional content in his videos.
Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT uncovered BitBoy Crypto’s advertisement prices by pretending to have a project that he wanted to promote on BitBoy’s channel. Although a BitBoy representative claimed that a team carefully vetted all sponsors, the representative performed little to no due diligence when speaking with ZachXBT, simply stating their prices, and asking for payment.
BitBoy has a history of deleting videos featuring projects that wound up being a scam or whose price collapsed -99% or more — but often not before a researcher saves screenshots with evidence that the videos existed.
According to ZachXBT’s research, several of the ICOs and NFTs that BitBoy promoted have ended up with zero bidders, or have bids at less than 1% of what they were worth at the time of his promotion.
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Another YouTuber named Erling Mengshoel, Jr., AKA “Atozy,” also called out BitBoy for promoting scams in a video in November 2021. BitBoy responded by filing a defamation lawsuit, claiming that he lost $75,000 due to Atozy’s allegations.
After Atozy used Twitter to ask the crypto community to crowdfund his legal costs, and crypto trader Cobie donated $100,000 in USDC to the cause, it seems that BitBoy has decided to pull the lawsuit.
ZachXBT tracked the return on investment for every “moonshot” video that BitBoy made in 2021. Most of the coins and tokens showed significant losses, with some having gone negative by more than 75% — one of them as much as 95.56%. ZachXBT noticed that suspected paid promotions performed the worst for investors, and that none of the tokens rallied 100X as BitBoy originally suggested would occur.
Despite the overly confident language used in his video titles, BitBoy has also repeatedly failed to predict whether bitcoin’s price would move up or down. ZachXBT’s findings prove that using BitBoy investment recommendations as a trading strategy will lose investors a significant amount of money.
The accusations against BitBoy are not limited to hiding promotional content. He’s also been caught plagiarizing other people’s content, after which he blamed his scriptwriter, and stealing other people’s art to create and sell NFTs, after which he claimed he was merely sampling the artwork.
BitBoy isn’t the first big YouTuber who’s been caught promoting investments without disclosing his compensation. Previous big names who have promoted scams or low-quality projects that later collapsed in price include Steven Seagal and members of the popular gaming channel The FaZe Clan.
Having 1.4 million subscribers might not save BitBoy if allegations of his involvement in promoting crypto scams can be proven.
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Source: https://protos.com/who-is-bitboy-crypto-and-why-does-everybody-hate-him/