My Review of "Bitconned"

Bitconned is a recently released Netflix exclusive documentary. It brings us the story of a con man named Ray Trapani and how he lied and cheated his way to success. I know a lot of people can become very frustrated with this documentary but it's also a real dose of reality. The beauty of it is that it's all real and it's all narrated to us from the criminal himself.

The documentary starts off with the introduction of Ray who admits that he's not a good guy. He talks about how he was born and bred to love money. When he says that he would do anything to make it I believed him. Indeed, he does a lot of shady things from his past to get to where he gets to in the future.

We get some accounts from some of his past about how he had swindled a medical prescription pad so that he could sell drugs when he was a young man. Ray's old partner then talks about how he was betrayed by Ray and had to do time in prison for the crimes. He would then escalate to doing bigger and more profitable crimes.

Pretty soon he got into cryptocurrency. Now Ray isn't the only person involved in these crimes. He has partners to help him out with these crimes but Ray is quite consistent and his partners have the same description of Ray in these situations. No one paints Ray in a nice picture not even himself.

There's so many elements of this movie that you can talk about. In some ways I love how it's Ray telling the story to give us the big middle finger as he gets away with the crime of the century and makes a Netflix special to boast about it. It's pretty much the total opposite of the true crime stories you normally hear where they sentenced the wrong guy. They didn't get the guy at all and he's laughing in our faces about it.

This will infuriate people but this is real life. The stuff that he is telling us actually happened and he's not even afraid to leave out the bad parts. The audacity of this guy to even do this is quite astonishing and impressive at the same time. How can people this bad live such amazing lives and not worry about a thing? Well now we have video proof and an explanation how.

Another thing to take out of this is how a small lie can snowball into a gigantic lie. Their crypto company continually got bigger and bigger because of the greed and corruption around the world. Ray isn't the only bad person. There's plenty of bad to go around and they were surrounded by it. In fact, if it wasn't for global greed their scam would never have worked in the first place. I can't knock them for taking advantage of an opportunity that was so easy for them to pick up.

If there's one positive thing you can take out of this movie is that there is money to be made everywhere. Opportunities are out there and anyone can be a millionaire if they really wanted to. Ray is kind of an example of a nightmarish version of the American dream. He's able to come up from modest beginnings and create an empire out of a single web page. The special powers they had were the gift of gab. Selling skills truly is an invaluable asset in this day in age.

Overall, I may be sick in the head but I actually really enjoyed this documentary. I don't like anyone in the movie but I liked how they set everything up and told the story. It's done in a realistic point of view even though it's told by Ray. Ray doesn't give a crap and spoke his truth and I believed everything. Then again he's a great salesman too. You can see why people bought from him. That's why I have to give this movie a 8 out of 10.