Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
The Million Dollar Fake Company - The Ray Trapani / Centra Tech story
Mon, 07 Apr 2025
The Ray Trapani case centers around the fraudulent cryptocurrency startup Centra Tech, which he co-founded alongside Sohrab Sharma and Robert Farkas. In 2017, the trio launched a fake ICO (Initial Coin Offering), ultimately scamming investors out of over $25 million. Their scheme gained credibility after being promoted by celebrities like Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled, both of whom were later fined by the SEC.
Who is Ray Trapani and how did his journey begin?
So this guy is about to make millions of dollars by hyping up a product that doesn't exist. Now, like me, the guy's name is Ray. And Ray is 24, living in Miami. And bro really wants to be rich. And he's always cooking up some kind of new scheme to make that happen. Like he's stealing prescription drugs and selling them for a while.
Then he and his friends borrow some money and they start a luxury car rental business. And that business does pretty well, but they're young and kind of dumb and pretty quickly they blow through all their profits and their business fails. And that is when Ray is back to square one and now he needs a new hustle to make money.
And one day in 2017, one of Bray's friends, this guy who we'll call Sorbet, Sorbet gets a crazy idea. They wanna create a debit card that lets you access your cryptocurrency. That way you can instantly buy stuff with your Bitcoin when you're like out at the store or something. And a debit card for crypto, honestly, it's not a terrible idea.
And so they're gonna create a whole fake company and attach it to a cryptocurrency, like a coin. However, Ray, Sorbet, and their other friend, this guy, Farkas, they have several problems with this plan. One, they know nothing about crypto, nothing about Bitcoin or anything about that space.
And two, the very specific technology for a crypto debit card, it either doesn't exist or these guys just don't have access to it. not in 2017 but whatever these guys just want to be rich and they're gonna do whatever it takes to make that happen and so they come up with this whole ass scam First, they set up a company called Centratech, completely fake and made up.
They make a company website and they make themselves the employees. Here's actually a picture of the three of them all dressed up like they know what they're doing. Then, to make themselves appear more credible, they create fake LinkedIn profiles for themselves, claiming that they're all Harvard graduates. They even make up a fake CEO of this fake company.
Like they literally Google the words old white guy and they find a random picture and they post that picture of that guy as the CEO. And so all of this looks legit. And now all they got to do is promote it. So they all go into crypto message boards and chat rooms and they start hyping up their fake company hoping to get people to invest. Here's the thing, though.
Some people do actually invest in this company. Not a ton, but, you know, it's something. But about a month or so in, suddenly, pow, their company gets a random endorsement from a somewhat known crypto guru. And overnight, kaboom, their company blows the f*** up. And suddenly, all kinds of people are investing.
And they now have millions of dollars invested in their fake company based on a technology that they don't have.
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