A new television series by MTV features arguably the channel’s first crypto personality. Rachel Siegel, a bitcoin advocate and proponent of mass adoption who’s behind the Youtube channel Crypto Finally, was invited to enrich the story of a $5 million SIM swapping scam with her expertise. The episode was aired recently, attracting much attention from the crypto community, and not only for what it showed, but also what was cut out.
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MTV Show Consults ‘Crypto Expert’ on a $5 Million Hack
The True Life Crime show premiered on MTV in January with the promise to give you “a closer look at the biggest true-crime headlines.” Its seventh episode, “The $5 Million Phone Hack,” has host Dometi Pongo finding out how 19-year-old Joel Ortiz got involved in a SIM swapping theft and was eventually tracked down by an elite law enforcement unit in California.
Viewers who watched on Feb. 19 saw some of the victims’ messages for Ortiz and heard praise for the React team, a task force of various police departments that investigates computer-related crime in the state. As news.Bitcoin.com reported in February 2019, Ortiz got 10 years in prison, the maximum punishment in this case, after pleading guilty.
But what would an investigative series be without the expert opinions? And while the state prosecutor and the defense attorney handled the legal aspects quite well, someone with an appropriate image and knowledge was needed to unravel the crypto side of the story. So the producers of the show, a third party company, found Rachel Siegel on Twitter, convinced her to take part and flew her to Los Angeles for the shoot.
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