As an actor best known for his roles on The O.C. and Gotham, Ben McKenzie considers himself a professional liar, a skill that he says makes him good at spotting deception. When a wave of cryptocurrency hype and celebrity-studded commercials arrived in 2021, McKenzie’s radar went up, and he dusted off his undergraduate economics degree and started doing research. His conclusions about the industry were blunt: McKenzie considers crypto a Ponzi scheme, a “generational hallucination” and a “quasi-cult.” He has since become one of America’s most-outspoken critics of crypto and published the book Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, with journalist Jacob Silverman in 2023. Now he’s tackling the topic in his directorial debut, a documentary titled Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, which explores the rise and fall of platforms such as FTX and Celsius Network and reveals the machinery behind the hype and speculation used to promote digital currencies to everyday people. The Financial Post spoke with McKenzie about his views on crypto, who’s really making (and losing) money off it and why victims of scams are often still believers.