I have about $20,000 frozen in Yotta. I never used the gaming features, I just wanted an account with the bucket feature. Luckily, I’m a natural saver and I have several other bank accounts that hold the majority of my money. For me, it’s only been an annoyance so far, but it’s still maddening since I worked hard for that money.
No hate, love that you can save that much. But what is your plan with it? Buying a house outright? I could never reach that much😵😵 (besides for a house deposit)
I also do the same. I also have multiple accounts. But at one time, I considered making Yotta my main account and transferring the majority of my money to it in the hopes of increasing my odds on winning the top prize of 10 million. But Curly told me that was a stupid idea and to just maximize the bulk of my savings to a high yield savings account. And that's what I did......Curly is the voice in my head
@@ru2225 I paid off all my debt and I don’t want anymore ever. So I have to save money to pay outright for things like cars, vacations, electronics, home repairs, etc.
Graham Stephan is getting ripped apart over his part in promoting Yotta. The comment section on his last video is on fire after the Coffeezilla expose. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out. *6/6/2024 update* AskSebby is also trying to hide/ignore the fact they he was a Yotta bank investor/promotor, even before Graham Stephan. In fact, it was his video that that led me to open an account with Yotta back in 2020. His videos on Yotta are now deleted and he is deleting my comments asking for him to do an update on the situation.
People whom listened to Graham are the one to blame, Graham promoted FTX, Celcius which were later be known as jewish scams, so why in hell would you trust Graham again on Yotta? I am waiting to see who are the men behind this robbery, i won t be surprised if those guys are relatives to Sam bankman-fried. It s always them.
Not letting promoters off the hook, but each individual also has a responsibility to understand what they're investing in. I know it's not a popular opinion today but you should probably know _exactly_ how something works before putting your life savings into it.
Between RushCard, Beam, and now Yotta/Synapse, it serves as a lesson to not put all your eggs in one basket. I keep my cash divided between three main interest-bearing accounts. AFAIK, none have any common middleman. My main checking account, where my direct deposit goes to and my , is a "real" bank with a bank charter and FDIC insurance.
This was great, thanks for covering this. It is still frustrating. As for me, I will take the approach of not putting all my eggs in one basket. I will use fintech's if they have a feature set I want, but I will never put that much money into any of them ever again.
Thank you, at least one person has their head on straight explaining this situation. I'm extremely frustrated and disappointed in Coffeezilla's coverage of the situation. With the tumbnail he's using and the fact that he's using the first half of the video as some kind of personal takedown of Yotta specifically, when Yotta's deterioration as a service is ultimately not the reason people have lost access to their money. Te's giving the wrong impression to a lot of people who only pay attention to the first few minutes of a video, that Yotta itself was a scam, and that it's victims' own fault for falling for it, when Yotta itself is also a victim to an extent. Or that Yotta was always as bad of a service as it became in the last few months, when the majority of the sponsorships happened, before things fell apart. Now even the Yotta subreddit thread where the video was posted itself is full of people pointing and laughing at the rubes that fell for the Yotta scam, seemingly unaware of the synapse/evolve situation at all. His video might actually have done more harm than good to the perception of legitimacy for the situation.
Thanks for the kind words! I think it's easy to point fingers in hindsight. I made videos using Yotta for years too and was of course totally unaware of Synapse's potential problems. It's one thing if you can prove certain people promoted a service while knowing it was failing, untrustworthy, or otherwise critically flawed. But if they had no idea those issues existed, they would be just as surprised as we are right now. At this point, it sucks for everyone involved. The fallout of the failure of people's character is far reaching.
Be accountable. You started using a service that “gamified” banking. Purposely avoided regulation. Laughed at regular banks. Guess what? Sometimes you lose games. Banks have regulations for a reason. Congrats on learning the same lesson “regular” banks learned 100 years ago. You chased that extra 3% of interest for the extra risk. What did you think the word risk means? This is the risk being realized. Did you think the extra interest was at no extra risk?
@@jnachtig2 Nothing about the gamefied banking is what caused this situation. The issue is that an intermediary that facilitates transactions between the fintech companies and the banks either did a poor job of tracking transactions or was skimming them and now the real, fdic insured banks where peoples money is being held froze all the accounts now that the ledger discrepancies with the middleman have reached a tipping point, until things get sortes out. This isn't a case of people being sore losers after taking a risk. You clearly don't understand the situation, but at least I can rest easy knowing you're comfortable up on that high horse.
The moment there was a discrepancy between ledgers between Evolve and Synapse, that should have triggered a predetermined set of steps to be followed by both/all companies to quickly resolve the issue. How could they not have had the foresight to have cya (cover your ass) steps in place? It boggles my mind how the discrepancy was allowed to pass for however long before Evolve decided to freeze everything? How was it that this scenario wasn't thought possible by everyones legal representatives (Evolve, Synapse, and Yotta)? Everyone should've had their bases covered in case of x, y, or z, and it's clear they did not have a plan in place
Sounds like it might have been upwards of 2 years. I think your point is valid that even for the sake of self preservation alarm bells could have been ringing. Granted lawsuits have been apparently happening for that long. I just get the vibe that the underlying plan of a lot of new tech companies is: grow at all costs then get out with a fat exit ($$$$), methods be damned.
Fintechs (and so the smart guys in the middle) helped usher in higher %rates paid on accounts, less fees and alternatives to traditional US banking. Big banks for years paid interest rates of 0.1% with a straight face.
Right? I mean you can't fault the decision-making process to create the new companies and offer "better" products to consumers. But the infrastructure of those products needs to actually be sound. In the future I wish we could investigate preemptively before jumping into what will soon be a sinking ship
Ask Sebby and Graham Stefan owe Yotta customers money for the damage they caused. Anyone who gave money to Yotta and/or Synapse for an ownership stake owes their victims compensation for the late fees and interest they incurred because of their actions. Sebby and Graham promoted Yotta and never posted a video warning people of the red flags. At least you did videos about the red flags Yotta had raised.
Yeah but the red flags I could see were just the end product itself going downhill fast, not the underlying middleman absolutely imploding. I guess there's a chance as equity investors that they saw some of this coming upwards of 2 years ago when litigation started with Evolve, but I was totally blindsided like most of us.
@@BrendanEvanthen Yotta is to blame, they should have warned us! At least in April, when Synapse was already filing for bankruptcy. We had about 2 weeks to withdraw our money.
who is here who got locked out their money in yotta? my account 1300usd got locked out too. good thing i pulled out my 10k prior this stupid issue to pay off my 2 cars. damn! i couldn't be more lucky!
@@BrendanEvanI'm currently finishing my masters in fintech and obviously this should be a case study for one of our courses! Sending this to my professor now 👍
I'm a little wary since most I have in prizepool which utilizes evolve but synapse wasn't evolved. Still have a good chunk locked up in yotta... Next court update is Friday. At this point want to just utilize a large bank that has decent APY. Looking at amex rn, 4.25%. I know others offer higher but I don't want to end up in the same situation...
I still like prizepool but now don't trust Evolve so I initiated a transfer last week to get half my money off of prizepool back to my traditional bank account so I won't be too worried if it gets frozen like my Juno account. I dislike that the transfers always take so long to settle with them. I did the transfer on Wednesday morning and as have last night the money still not showing available with my bank.
Yeah it seems like Evolve has the cleanest nose of anyone involved at this point. They were the first to call out problems publicly. I’m hoping Prize Pool keeps it together. I’m guessing there will be a mass exodus from Yotta and most of the other Fintech companies that had relied on Synapse.
New financial technology without new financial regulation is destined for eventual failure. As long as the impetus for regulation is when people lose money, consumers will bear the risk when things go wrong. So regard any fintech company as a risky investment instead of an FDIC insured bank account because clearly as a consumer you have much less protection when problems occur.
I had Yotta for one month at the end of 2022. Something about it didn’t sit well with me it felt like a Ponzi scheme to me. I felt Yotta was using my deposit (and all other deposits) to pay game winners, etc.
No one outside those companies saw this happening, so you can’t beat yourself up about it. I hate(d) the direction the app was going in general and called that out but THIS is stuff lately is a whole different story
I was surprised and happy that I got anything back since all of that money invested into crypto was 100% at risk and was never promised as being being protected by FDIC or SIPC. All of these fintechs promote their service in a way that leads the average person to believe their fiat is just as safe as using any traditional brick & mortar bank
The problem with making financial services more complex than necessary is that when it works it seems like a great thing. But when it ceases to work well, the exodus of users causes a collapse of the whole mess. I was always suspicious of PayPal when it started up. There was no way it could have made any money with the business model it started out with. Eventually it became basically a credit card processor and it worked out for them, but the original model was never sustainable.
Wow I had no idea any of this was going down! It makes me question whether or not putting a lot of money into Robinhood and taking advantage of all their match offerings is a good idea or not. I feel like I'm likely in good hands with Vlad Tenev in charge of things, but definitely worth looking into. Thanks for sharing!
That’s why I only keep 50% in Robinhood and the rest in Chase bank. As for Robinhood and other big investment apps tho, you should be fine. They are a larger company.
I just came here to ask the same question. Robinhood cash scares me now. And remember they were coming out with a credit card that offered 3% all of a sudden that disappeared. That’s a little sketchy.
They are a fully regulated, fully insured, public American company. They would just transfer your holdings to another brokerage if they run into any problems. This applies to all the major brokerages in the U.S. You can sleep well knowing you would get your money. How long would it take? That I can't really say. I'm just extremely confident you would get your money.
@@tgo007 but Robinhood has a cash portion separate from their brokerage stuff. If your funds are in that to earn interest as a HYSA it’s basically the same house of cards as yotta as far as I can tell
Wow, this is absolutely terrible, and completely unacceptable. I very minimally utilize banks and it’s because of an aversion to scenarios like this. I keep the bulk of my money in crypto (self custody) or in my brokerage account. Banks at this point are used for moving money and bill pay.
Also, do you know if this is going to affect cash app or chime? Those are the only two other accounts I have and this whole thing has made me kind of scared to use any of these apps
I think the only people that can know that kind of thing are working inside the companies in question as we speak. We just don't have access to that kind of info. Flying blind out here together.
Stephen Graham buying part ownership of Yotta is what crosses the line from promoting a product that you can have plausible deniability about its business practices to then becoming the face of someone trying to profit off of a scummy product and also hawking it to your fans/customer base.
Well, is there any proof that the money held in the FOB accounts at Evolve matches the customer records at Synapse and Yotta? If the account records at the fintechs show more money than is in the FOB account, then we have not poor bookkeeping, but actual fraud. And what is the first thing that happens when financial companies get in trouble, and need money? They often use customer funds to keep their heads above water.
When the user agreed to the conversion of his/her account to a brokerage account, it's likely that permission was granted to some non-fiduciary third party to use invested funds for all sorts of investments, with all levels of risk. Good luck.
I think what confuses me is that if the money is in a brokerage account where money is then swept in the other accounts that are not related to Evolve, how is Evolve holding funds? How are they holding funds that are supposedly not there, or are they actually there still?
@@BrendanEvanI see, then we should be talking about which bank is holding funds that are in the brokerage program, right? Like if Evolve isn’t holdings the money and the funds are swept into a program that is then put into other banks, then why aren’t we mentioning these other banks. Evolve seems to have frozen everything, I don’t hear anything about the other banks that are involved?
This is so much better than the Coffeezilla video. The Coffee video seemed like more of a "told you so" response to a video he released previously. Also seemed like an opportunity to knock down other personal finance RUclipsrs.
If only this could be build on ledger that would be made secure cryptographically and would be validated independently by thousands of nodes around world. Just kidding, Gary Gensler to rescue.
This may be a totally different issue, if I were you I would call the bank (making sure it's an official number from your card or maybe their website, nowhere else) and ask about this to make sure you haven't been hacked
@@BrendanEvan Ok what I really meant to say is, do Sofi and Ally Bank structured the same way as Yotta was with this third party between themselves and the actual FDIC insurer bank?
Kids, why not listen to your grandparents (No, not your parents. They're probably as clueless as you are) and speak to a fiduciary investment advisor. If you start making sound investments now that you're young, you could retire as millionaires, instead of savings-less and cursing the advice you took from a RUclips influencer.
@@BrendanEvanMost of us don't need them. A Vanguard/Fidelity/Schwab account is all we need to buy very low cost index funds and let it sit. Anytime I futz around buying individual stocks, I don't pick well.
The moment there was a discrepancy between ledgers between Evolve and Synapse, that should have triggered a predetermined set of steps to be followed by both/all companies to quickly resolve the issue. How could they not have had the foresight to have cya (cover your ass) steps in place? It boggles my mind how the discrepancy was allowed to pass for however long before Evolve decided to freeze everything? How was it that this scenario wasn't thought possible by everyones legal representatives (Evolve, Synapse, and Yotta)? Everyone should've had their bases covered in case of x, y, or z, and it's clear they did not have a plan in place
My Chase and BoA accounts are functioning just fine. What the hell is a Yotta? Sounds like a cheap car Toyota would make, not a place I would put my hard earned money.
I sure hope not! I think the problems are localized to anything Synapse touched. I just hope others with similar setups do a better job overall in the future.
I'm not confident they can unwind the tangled up ledger for one thing. Also how a you "demand" it? I'm guessing Evolve and Synapse are getting hundreds of emails a day that just get ignored for now. It's such an unfortunate situation for consumers with locked up money. (I technically do too, but its only $19)
Evolve claimed they don't have users money it was all transferred back to Synapse. Also because when they did have the money it was setup as FBO accounts so as the end user you don't have a direct relationship with the bank.
@@BrendanEvanno it's not, it's insurance is held at a pass thru bank, if there is an issue unrelated to that pass thru bank FDIC coverage will not trigger.
@Decajack I agree, it is not FDIC insured. Bank (insured) Middleman (not insured) Front facing company (not insured) If either the middleman or front facing company fail you are probably not FDIC insured as they themselves are not banks.
@@ShadowFlame40 I agree, Yotta is NOT FDIC insured. They will say they are on their website etc... But it just means the banks they use are FDIC insured. And that means nothing because the banks don't keep track of your money records. Yotta does. So if something happens to those records, your screwed.
AMEX is a long-standing established business with sufficient holdings to meet customer obligations. You need not worry with any REAL bank or service provider compared to any garbo fintech spawning in the last few years
That’s the thing, these kinds of accounts ARE FDIC insured. The tricky thing is that the bank itself isn’t at fault for the mishap here. So FDIC can’t do anything. Or wont (?)
Can't say really understand...no knowledge of what these APs (?) do or provide. Have always been happy with my bank and my debit card and my stock broker ...everything works fine...so don't "see" value adds would be looking for (i.e., what is it these "fin techs" would do?) Said differently please back up a bit and explain what a "fin tech" does at a user level..
Ally is a real FDIC partner bank, so is SoFi which I think is better imo. There's really no "safe" bank tho, any bank can go bust hypothetically. But you are definitely faarrr safer and you would get your money back quicker if Ally went under, (Since You are a customer to the Bank directly, thus FDIC would protect you directly) compared to whats happening to Yotta
@@luigigrabspam4596I hadn't realized sofi had become a real bank I thought they were still a fintech. But I looked it up and they got their charter in 2022. I like Ally and have been using them for 3 years to replace capitalone as my primary bank. I always recommend Discover to people. If I didn't already use them for my credit card I'd use their checking and/or savings. I don't like having everything with one financial institution.
I knew the CEO in college. He was always a little sus. I have friends who worked with him and left because things were already getting very illegal from the get-go.
From my perspective Evolve is the villain. They are the issuer of my debit card and they are who froze access to anyone from moving money from any of the fintech platforms.
Why don’t people just put their money at big banks or credit union? All this high yield isn’t worth losing your cash reserves, if you want 5% yield just buy a CD
I was using Yotta because at the time we could get 2-4% interest on cash when banks were offering 0.3%. Of course if we knew then that we could lose access to our cash we wouldn’t have done it but that’s not foreseeable.
Big banks give almost 0% interest to their customers while making insane profits off of their deposits. And try to find ways to apply fees to every service and transaction to profit even more. I think most people would be enticed by fintechs offering to share a larger portion of the money made off their deposits without worry that there is going to be extra fees for all the basic services. And advertised that your money is safe in their partner FDIC bank doesn't leave people concerned that they'll be losing their cash reserves by getting away from big banking. Getting out of the traditional banking system is why crypto is also so appealing to people. Although trying to find ways to profit off of it leads it being looked at as an investment rather than a currency.
Imagine being stupid enough to put all of your money into a “fintech” - might as well have bought crypto on a defunct exchange. Promises of free money always have a cost
Or you could have your money in a real bank or a real online bank with 5% interest rate. Instead, people followed and trusted POS YT influencers who dont give 2 sh** about their audience or the consequences.
Yotta updates: www.withyotta.com/payment-processing-updates
I have about $20,000 frozen in Yotta. I never used the gaming features, I just wanted an account with the bucket feature. Luckily, I’m a natural saver and I have several other bank accounts that hold the majority of my money. For me, it’s only been an annoyance so far, but it’s still maddening since I worked hard for that money.
You’re an amazing saver it sounds like, but wow what a mess overall! I hope everyone gets their money out ASAP.
No hate, love that you can save that much. But what is your plan with it? Buying a house outright? I could never reach that much😵😵 (besides for a house deposit)
I also do the same. I also have multiple accounts. But at one time, I considered making Yotta my main account and transferring the majority of my money to it in the hopes of increasing my odds on winning the top prize of 10 million. But Curly told me that was a stupid idea and to just maximize the bulk of my savings to a high yield savings account. And that's what I did......Curly is the voice in my head
@@ru2225 I paid off all my debt and I don’t want anymore ever. So I have to save money to pay outright for things like cars, vacations, electronics, home repairs, etc.
Ally Bank has savings buckets, without the suspect gambling aspects of Yotta.
Graham Stephan is getting ripped apart over his part in promoting Yotta. The comment section on his last video is on fire after the Coffeezilla expose. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out. *6/6/2024 update* AskSebby is also trying to hide/ignore the fact they he was a Yotta bank investor/promotor, even before Graham Stephan. In fact, it was his video that that led me to open an account with Yotta back in 2020. His videos on Yotta are now deleted and he is deleting my comments asking for him to do an update on the situation.
Same thing happened after he promoted FTX. People have SHORT memories. Especially after he deletes the evidence.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing. No one will remember in 3 months lolz @@clutch2827
People whom listened to Graham are the one to blame, Graham promoted FTX, Celcius which were later be known as jewish scams, so why in hell would you trust Graham again on Yotta? I am waiting to see who are the men behind this robbery, i won t be surprised if those guys are relatives to Sam bankman-fried. It s always them.
He's a scrub, people follow him like sheep.
Not letting promoters off the hook, but each individual also has a responsibility to understand what they're investing in. I know it's not a popular opinion today but you should probably know _exactly_ how something works before putting your life savings into it.
Thank you for going into all of this!
Wow thanks for covering this. Really well executed. Lot of people oversimplifying this or missing the point.
Thanks!
Between RushCard, Beam, and now Yotta/Synapse, it serves as a lesson to not put all your eggs in one basket. I keep my cash divided between three main interest-bearing accounts. AFAIK, none have any common middleman. My main checking account, where my direct deposit goes to and my , is a "real" bank with a bank charter and FDIC insurance.
You mean don't put your eggs in a basket with hole in the bottom. Millennials are so gullible. They believe in the perpetual motion machine.
This was great, thanks for covering this. It is still frustrating. As for me, I will take the approach of not putting all my eggs in one basket. I will use fintech's if they have a feature set I want, but I will never put that much money into any of them ever again.
Thanks Elizabeth!
This was a finance documentary...ART!!! great video!!!
Thank you, at least one person has their head on straight explaining this situation.
I'm extremely frustrated and disappointed in Coffeezilla's coverage of the situation. With the tumbnail he's using and the fact that he's using the first half of the video as some kind of personal takedown of Yotta specifically, when Yotta's deterioration as a service is ultimately not the reason people have lost access to their money. Te's giving the wrong impression to a lot of people who only pay attention to the first few minutes of a video, that Yotta itself was a scam, and that it's victims' own fault for falling for it, when Yotta itself is also a victim to an extent. Or that Yotta was always as bad of a service as it became in the last few months, when the majority of the sponsorships happened, before things fell apart. Now even the Yotta subreddit thread where the video was posted itself is full of people pointing and laughing at the rubes that fell for the Yotta scam, seemingly unaware of the synapse/evolve situation at all. His video might actually have done more harm than good to the perception of legitimacy for the situation.
Thanks for the kind words!
I think it's easy to point fingers in hindsight. I made videos using Yotta for years too and was of course totally unaware of Synapse's potential problems. It's one thing if you can prove certain people promoted a service while knowing it was failing, untrustworthy, or otherwise critically flawed. But if they had no idea those issues existed, they would be just as surprised as we are right now. At this point, it sucks for everyone involved. The fallout of the failure of people's character is far reaching.
Be accountable. You started using a service that “gamified” banking. Purposely avoided regulation. Laughed at regular banks. Guess what? Sometimes you lose games. Banks have regulations for a reason. Congrats on learning the same lesson “regular” banks learned 100 years ago. You chased that extra 3% of interest for the extra risk. What did you think the word risk means? This is the risk being realized. Did you think the extra interest was at no extra risk?
@@jnachtig2 Nothing about the gamefied banking is what caused this situation. The issue is that an intermediary that facilitates transactions between the fintech companies and the banks either did a poor job of tracking transactions or was skimming them and now the real, fdic insured banks where peoples money is being held froze all the accounts now that the ledger discrepancies with the middleman have reached a tipping point, until things get sortes out. This isn't a case of people being sore losers after taking a risk.
You clearly don't understand the situation, but at least I can rest easy knowing you're comfortable up on that high horse.
Fascinating! I wonder what other companies are at risk due to having a similar setup? Robinhood cash? Marcus ?
Great video man, well explained
Thank you!
The moment there was a discrepancy between ledgers between Evolve and Synapse, that should have triggered a predetermined set of steps to be followed by both/all companies to quickly resolve the issue. How could they not have had the foresight to have cya (cover your ass) steps in place? It boggles my mind how the discrepancy was allowed to pass for however long before Evolve decided to freeze everything? How was it that this scenario wasn't thought possible by everyones legal representatives (Evolve, Synapse, and Yotta)? Everyone should've had their bases covered in case of x, y, or z, and it's clear they did not have a plan in place
Sounds like it might have been upwards of 2 years. I think your point is valid that even for the sake of self preservation alarm bells could have been ringing. Granted lawsuits have been apparently happening for that long.
I just get the vibe that the underlying plan of a lot of new tech companies is: grow at all costs then get out with a fat exit ($$$$), methods be damned.
So where should I put my money
@@cupidok2768local credit union, fidelity, vanguard, Schwab, mattress…
Awesome video! Thanks for the breakdown. Just subbed!
Awesome, thank you!
Fintechs (and so the smart guys in the middle) helped usher in higher %rates paid on accounts, less fees and alternatives to traditional US banking. Big banks for years paid interest rates of 0.1% with a straight face.
Right? I mean you can't fault the decision-making process to create the new companies and offer "better" products to consumers. But the infrastructure of those products needs to actually be sound. In the future I wish we could investigate preemptively before jumping into what will soon be a sinking ship
You think it's bad now, wait six months. The next boom is going to be "decentralized investments"
Like DeFi tokens Sphere, Safuu, CronosNodes, Safemoon, Evergrow, and Squidgrow lol
Ask Sebby and Graham Stefan owe Yotta customers money for the damage they caused. Anyone who gave money to Yotta and/or Synapse for an ownership stake owes their victims compensation for the late fees and interest they incurred because of their actions. Sebby and Graham promoted Yotta and never posted a video warning people of the red flags. At least you did videos about the red flags Yotta had raised.
Yeah but the red flags I could see were just the end product itself going downhill fast, not the underlying middleman absolutely imploding. I guess there's a chance as equity investors that they saw some of this coming upwards of 2 years ago when litigation started with Evolve, but I was totally blindsided like most of us.
@@BrendanEvanthen Yotta is to blame, they should have warned us! At least in April, when Synapse was already filing for bankruptcy. We had about 2 weeks to withdraw our money.
The blame lies with Yotta but the marketing must reflect on the products they promote
Thank you for all that you do to keep us informed and educated.
My pleasure!
Fdic is for bank finacially failing not software failure. Like getting fdic insurance because the bank has no internet
who is here who got locked out their money in yotta? my account 1300usd got locked out too. good thing i pulled out my 10k prior this stupid issue to pay off my 2 cars. damn! i couldn't be more lucky!
how about your 3rd and 4th cars?
This is amazing! Feels like reading HBS case, but in a video mode! I appreciate the detailed explanation of how the BaaS work
Thanks!
@@BrendanEvanI'm currently finishing my masters in fintech and obviously this should be a case study for one of our courses! Sending this to my professor now 👍
I'm a little wary since most I have in prizepool which utilizes evolve but synapse wasn't evolved. Still have a good chunk locked up in yotta... Next court update is Friday. At this point want to just utilize a large bank that has decent APY. Looking at amex rn, 4.25%. I know others offer higher but I don't want to end up in the same situation...
I still like prizepool but now don't trust Evolve so I initiated a transfer last week to get half my money off of prizepool back to my traditional bank account so I won't be too worried if it gets frozen like my Juno account.
I dislike that the transfers always take so long to settle with them. I did the transfer on Wednesday morning and as have last night the money still not showing available with my bank.
Yeah it seems like Evolve has the cleanest nose of anyone involved at this point. They were the first to call out problems publicly. I’m hoping Prize Pool keeps it together. I’m guessing there will be a mass exodus from Yotta and most of the other Fintech companies that had relied on Synapse.
New financial technology without new financial regulation is destined for eventual failure. As long as the impetus for regulation is when people lose money, consumers will bear the risk when things go wrong. So regard any fintech company as a risky investment instead of an FDIC insured bank account because clearly as a consumer you have much less protection when problems occur.
I had Yotta for one month at the end of 2022. Something about it didn’t sit well with me it felt like a Ponzi scheme to me. I felt Yotta was using my deposit (and all other deposits) to pay game winners, etc.
Damn, should have listened to you 2 months ago 😢!
No one outside those companies saw this happening, so you can’t beat yourself up about it. I hate(d) the direction the app was going in general and called that out but THIS is stuff lately is a whole different story
@@BrendanEvanI pulled out half my cash but I don’t like this… the other half is still in… a quarter of my emergency savings.
My question is why would you pick this bank over other Banks like Chase, US BANK KeyBank?
The only way to fix this is to make this a jailable crime
When BlockFi went belly up it took a long time before getting any money back and I definitely didn't get all of it back. Hope this one is different.
I was surprised and happy that I got anything back since all of that money invested into crypto was 100% at risk and was never promised as being being protected by FDIC or SIPC.
All of these fintechs promote their service in a way that leads the average person to believe their fiat is just as safe as using any traditional brick & mortar bank
Once again, being financially challenged my whole life, I never have to worry about money in others' hands. Whew. Another bullet dodged!
The problem with making financial services more complex than necessary is that when it works it seems like a great thing. But when it ceases to work well, the exodus of users causes a collapse of the whole mess. I was always suspicious of PayPal when it started up. There was no way it could have made any money with the business model it started out with. Eventually it became basically a credit card processor and it worked out for them, but the original model was never sustainable.
You were one of the RUclips channels telling people to take their money out of Yotta. I hope people took your advice.
To be fair, it wasn’t because of the likelihood of this sort of thing happening. I just thought the service sucks 😅
Wow I had no idea any of this was going down! It makes me question whether or not putting a lot of money into Robinhood and taking advantage of all their match offerings is a good idea or not. I feel like I'm likely in good hands with Vlad Tenev in charge of things, but definitely worth looking into. Thanks for sharing!
That’s why I only keep 50% in Robinhood and the rest in Chase bank.
As for Robinhood and other big investment apps tho, you should be fine. They are a larger company.
I just came here to ask the same question. Robinhood cash scares me now. And remember they were coming out with a credit card that offered 3% all of a sudden that disappeared. That’s a little sketchy.
They are a fully regulated, fully insured, public American company. They would just transfer your holdings to another brokerage if they run into any problems. This applies to all the major brokerages in the U.S. You can sleep well knowing you would get your money. How long would it take? That I can't really say. I'm just extremely confident you would get your money.
@@tgo007 That’s a good point, thank you!
@@tgo007 but Robinhood has a cash portion separate from their brokerage stuff. If your funds are in that to earn interest as a HYSA it’s basically the same house of cards as yotta as far as I can tell
Great explanation!
Thanks!
I had money in Yotta as well but I withdrew it before this happened. Praise the Lord!❤ Jesus Loves U❤
Wow, this is absolutely terrible, and completely unacceptable.
I very minimally utilize banks and it’s because of an aversion to scenarios like this. I keep the bulk of my money in crypto (self custody) or in my brokerage account.
Banks at this point are used for moving money and bill pay.
Thank you Ray
@@BrendanEvan absolutely! This was a good topic, very informative. I we can’t see “everything” gotta mean on the tribe. This hasn’t even hit my radar.
Great video, thanks for covering this. What a disaster!
Also, do you know if this is going to affect cash app or chime? Those are the only two other accounts I have and this whole thing has made me kind of scared to use any of these apps
I think the only people that can know that kind of thing are working inside the companies in question as we speak. We just don't have access to that kind of info. Flying blind out here together.
Stephen Graham buying part ownership of Yotta is what crosses the line from promoting a product that you can have plausible deniability about its business practices to then becoming the face of someone trying to profit off of a scummy product and also hawking it to your fans/customer base.
Well, is there any proof that the money held in the FOB accounts at Evolve matches the customer records at Synapse and Yotta? If the account records at the fintechs show more money than is in the FOB account, then we have not poor bookkeeping, but actual fraud. And what is the first thing that happens when financial companies get in trouble, and need money? They often use customer funds to keep their heads above water.
We can't know that as bystanders but I hope it can be tracked down
When the user agreed to the conversion of his/her account to a brokerage account, it's likely that permission was granted to some non-fiduciary third party to use invested funds for all sorts of investments, with all levels of risk. Good luck.
So.... Who stole the money???? That s the only question that matter!!! Maybe all of them??
I think what confuses me is that if the money is in a brokerage account where money is then swept in the other accounts that are not related to Evolve, how is Evolve holding funds? How are they holding funds that are supposedly not there, or are they actually there still?
The best I understand it, Evolve isn’t holding the funds swept into the brokerage program. They use the DDA instead
@@BrendanEvanI see, then we should be talking about which bank is holding funds that are in the brokerage program, right? Like if Evolve isn’t holdings the money and the funds are swept into a program that is then put into other banks, then why aren’t we mentioning these other banks. Evolve seems to have frozen everything, I don’t hear anything about the other banks that are involved?
Be wary of having all your eggs in one basket, spread risk over several banks, don't rely on just one, even if they are insured
This is so much better than the Coffeezilla video. The Coffee video seemed like more of a "told you so" response to a video he released previously. Also seemed like an opportunity to knock down other personal finance RUclipsrs.
Thanks! His videos are so well done 😅
If only this could be build on ledger that would be made secure cryptographically and would be validated independently by thousands of nodes around world. Just kidding, Gary Gensler to rescue.
How about my banking apps not working to transfer money because of remotely controlling my account
This may be a totally different issue, if I were you I would call the bank (making sure it's an official number from your card or maybe their website, nowhere else) and ask about this to make sure you haven't been hacked
Can what happed with Yotta also happen with other banks RUclipsrs promoted, like Ally and Sofi bank?
From what I’ve read, people making videos in their garages had nothing to do with this failure. Synapse imploding did.
@@BrendanEvan Ok what I really meant to say is, do Sofi and Ally Bank structured the same way as Yotta was with this third party between themselves and the actual FDIC insurer bank?
Ally and Sofi are banks so they are FDIC members. It should be less of a hassle if they went under. Yotta is not a bank.
Kids, why not listen to your grandparents (No, not your parents. They're probably as clueless as you are) and speak to a fiduciary investment advisor. If you start making sound investments now that you're young, you could retire as millionaires, instead of savings-less and cursing the advice you took from a RUclips influencer.
Most of us have no idea what a fiduciary is but that would be awesome if we did!
@@BrendanEvanMost of us don't need them. A Vanguard/Fidelity/Schwab account is all we need to buy very low cost index funds and let it sit. Anytime I futz around buying individual stocks, I don't pick well.
The moment there was a discrepancy between ledgers between Evolve and Synapse, that should have triggered a predetermined set of steps to be followed by both/all companies to quickly resolve the issue. How could they not have had the foresight to have cya (cover your ass) steps in place? It boggles my mind how the discrepancy was allowed to pass for however long before Evolve decided to freeze everything? How was it that this scenario wasn't thought possible by everyones legal representatives (Evolve, Synapse, and Yotta)? Everyone should've had their bases covered in case of x, y, or z, and it's clear they did not have a plan in place
@KLondike5 I generally agree, that’s the way I invest personally
Greatly appreciate the video! If you can keep us in the loop Il be a subscriber for life!
This is why old people don't trust banks anymore.
I’m just trying to figure out options and stock trading without gambling.
So do you think I should get my money out of wealthfront?
I'm not personally yanking money out of other accounts with a similar brokerage cash setup. But you do what makes you happy!
Yes. Turn it into gold.
My Chase and BoA accounts are functioning just fine. What the hell is a Yotta? Sounds like a cheap car Toyota would make, not a place I would put my hard earned money.
YOTA CLOSED MY ACCOUNT AND HELD MY PAY CHECK HOSTAGE NOW KM IN THE NEGITIVES ITS CRAZY AND THEY WILL KOT TELL ME WHY MY ACCOUNT WAS PROMINENTLY
does Robinhood have some of these problems?
I sure hope not! I think the problems are localized to anything Synapse touched. I just hope others with similar setups do a better job overall in the future.
Why can't customers demend their money from Evolve bank?
I'm not confident they can unwind the tangled up ledger for one thing. Also how a you "demand" it? I'm guessing Evolve and Synapse are getting hundreds of emails a day that just get ignored for now. It's such an unfortunate situation for consumers with locked up money. (I technically do too, but its only $19)
Evolve claimed they don't have users money it was all transferred back to Synapse. Also because when they did have the money it was setup as FBO accounts so as the end user you don't have a direct relationship with the bank.
Yota is not FDIC-insured
yes it is, www.withyotta.com/security
@@BrendanEvanno it's not, it's insurance is held at a pass thru bank, if there is an issue unrelated to that pass thru bank FDIC coverage will not trigger.
@Decajack I agree, it is not FDIC insured.
Bank (insured)
Middleman (not insured)
Front facing company (not insured)
If either the middleman or front facing company fail you are probably not FDIC insured as they themselves are not banks.
@@ShadowFlame40 I agree, Yotta is NOT FDIC insured. They will say they are on their website etc... But it just means the banks they use are FDIC insured. And that means nothing because the banks don't keep track of your money records. Yotta does. So if something happens to those records, your screwed.
Never trust anyone under 40 with your money.
We need decentralized tech...
Simple is that
I got 15k in there just locked up... FXXKING GRAHAM
Does anyone know if American Express uses this system. I’m looking for a hysa but do not want to get caught in a situation like yotta
AMEX is a long-standing established business with sufficient holdings to meet customer obligations. You need not worry with any REAL bank or service provider compared to any garbo fintech spawning in the last few years
Why is anybody even putting money in a bank that's not FDIC insured???
That’s the thing, these kinds of accounts ARE FDIC insured. The tricky thing is that the bank itself isn’t at fault for the mishap here. So FDIC can’t do anything. Or wont (?)
Can't say really understand...no knowledge of what these APs (?) do or provide. Have always been happy with my bank and my debit card and my stock broker ...everything works fine...so don't "see" value adds would be looking for (i.e., what is it these "fin techs" would do?) Said differently please back up a bit and explain what a "fin tech" does at a user level..
Y’all I need to know if Ally is a safe bank???
Ally is a real FDIC partner bank, so is SoFi which I think is better imo. There's really no "safe" bank tho, any bank can go bust hypothetically. But you are definitely faarrr safer and you would get your money back quicker if Ally went under, (Since You are a customer to the Bank directly, thus FDIC would protect you directly) compared to whats happening to Yotta
@@luigigrabspam4596I hadn't realized sofi had become a real bank I thought they were still a fintech. But I looked it up and they got their charter in 2022.
I like Ally and have been using them for 3 years to replace capitalone as my primary bank. I always recommend Discover to people. If I didn't already use them for my credit card I'd use their checking and/or savings. I don't like having everything with one financial institution.
This should be a reason to have a stockpile of cash on the side and why a fully digital economy isn’t the way to go.
I joined early to make few dollars. But got out once % dropped. It's just like crypto
Jail this Synapse CEO Sankaet Pathak
I knew the CEO in college. He was always a little sus. I have friends who worked with him and left because things were already getting very illegal from the get-go.
the story needs a villain
(Is Synapse not the villain? Or are you thinking like a maniacal overlord wearing a cape?)
@@BrendanEvan has to be a human villain really
From my perspective Evolve is the villain. They are the issuer of my debit card and they are who froze access to anyone from moving money from any of the fintech platforms.
April 15 😡😡😡😡😡
Why don’t people just put their money at big banks or credit union? All this high yield isn’t worth losing your cash reserves, if you want 5% yield just buy a CD
I was using Yotta because at the time we could get 2-4% interest on cash when banks were offering 0.3%. Of course if we knew then that we could lose access to our cash we wouldn’t have done it but that’s not foreseeable.
Big banks give almost 0% interest to their customers while making insane profits off of their deposits. And try to find ways to apply fees to every service and transaction to profit even more.
I think most people would be enticed by fintechs offering to share a larger portion of the money made off their deposits without worry that there is going to be extra fees for all the basic services. And advertised that your money is safe in their partner FDIC bank doesn't leave people concerned that they'll be losing their cash reserves by getting away from big banking.
Getting out of the traditional banking system is why crypto is also so appealing to people. Although trying to find ways to profit off of it leads it being looked at as an investment rather than a currency.
Great depression all over again
Graham and sebby should be held liable
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16❤
What religion are the CEO's of these companies?😏
It’s called the cult of “More”
Imagine being stupid enough to put all of your money into a “fintech” - might as well have bought crypto on a defunct exchange. Promises of free money always have a cost
Or you could have your money in a real bank or a real online bank with 5% interest rate. Instead, people followed and trusted POS YT influencers who dont give 2 sh** about their audience or the consequences.
absolute disaster lol. total shitshow
Pretty much
You should thank to coffeezilla he solved the case and you got a content from him.
I recorded this video last week 😂 3 days before he posted his video