New York at Year's End (5)
Emily Chloe, the self-proclaimed French heiress.
In truth, she was from Algeria and had moved to France as a child. She grew up in an ordinary family in Lyon, then crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of the American Dream. In Chicago, she worked as a babysitter for wealthy children, teaching them French while quietly learning how the rich lived. After that, she headed to the New York she had always longed for and began her full-scale identity fraud.
With the money she had made along the way, she draped herself in designer labels from head to toe, stayed in luxury hotels, and tipped the staff with hundred-dollar bills. At parties, she happened to meet women from high society and told them she was the only daughter of a French nuclear magnate. She uploaded photos of herself mingling with elite friends to Linstagram, and anyone who saw them had no doubt that she was a genuine heiress.
Of course, the money she had saved up soon ran out. But there was no need to worry. By that point, she had met a businessman boyfriend, and she was spending his card as freely as if it were her own.
I never did figure out what Emily Chloe’s endgame was. Maybe she just wanted to slip naturally into high society, or maybe she had intended to scam people from the start. Either way, she realized that fame could be turned into money, and she came up with a business called a social club.
And apparently, it looked like a pretty good business. A lot of people invested in her, and she even got to the brink of securing a $30 million loan.
How was that even possible?
Maybe because America’s history is still relatively short, but Americans have always had a strange fantasy about Europe—especially France. The concept of a heiress from France worked beautifully. On top of that, closed social circles like these reject outsiders but are generous to insiders. It was incredibly hard to get in, but once you were inside, nobody bothered to check you too closely.
That was probably how this happened.
Emily Chloe’s scam, the so-called Heiress Scandal, was a major event in New York society at the time. She had borrowed money from more than a few people, and she had nearly fooled even a major bank.
The funny thing was that many of the celebrities who had invested in her money denied, flat-out, that they had been harmed at all. Well, it wasn’t as if they were some old grandpa who had once chaired the Nasdaq stock exchange. Falling for a girl that young had to sting terribly. For a while, all of New York’s upper crust became the butt of everyone’s jokes.
In the end, Emily Chloe’s fraud was exposed, and she went to prison.
That sounds tragic if you stop there, but in truth, this story is a comedy. While she was on trial, she wrote a book about her own scam and used the proceeds to pay off all the debts she owed. Her story was turned into both a drama and a film.
The reason I knew about her in the first place was because I had seen the movie. And she was paroled after five years. Even after that, she kept working as an influencer on Linsta and A-Tube.
She never became the upper-class woman she had wanted to be, but at least she lived comfortably enough that nobody could say she was worse off than anyone else.
This was a world where fame alone could become money. No wonder everyone fought so hard to become famous.
Just as I was thinking that, Emily shouted in a voice sharp with irritation.
"You can’t insult people and still call it manners! This is disgusting! I don’t want to spend another second at this lousy party!"
As if furious, she strode quickly out of the ballroom.
I looked at the people standing there in a daze and said, "What are you all waiting for? If you lent her money or invested in her, go after her now. If you let her slip away, you won’t be seeing her again for a while."
At that, about a dozen people rushed after her all at once.
The crowd watched the scene with wide-eyed disbelief.
I felt oddly proud, as if I’d just helped the credit society take one more step forward.
Who would’ve thought I’d run into a scammer at a place like this?
I thought of what Senior Dongho had said.
Well, I’d met the scammer. What came next, again?
Despite the minor commotion, the party went on.
Sara came over to me.
"How did you know she was a scammer?"
"Something about the way she talked felt off, so I poked at it a little."
"And she really was a scammer?"
"Looks that way."
Sara laughed out loud.
"Coming here with you really does make things interesting, Miru. So how’s the party?"
"I’m enjoying it. Have you finished saying hello to everyone?"
"Yeah. I think I’m almost done. There are still a few people I haven’t seen yet, so I’m going to greet them and then head out. What about you?"
"I’ll go with you then."
What was I supposed to do, stay here by myself?
Just as the two of us were talking, a man walked over to us.
He looked to be in his mid-thirties, about 175 centimeters tall, with an average build. He was East Asian and wore black-rimmed glasses.
He greeted Sara first.
"We meet again."
"It’s nice to see you."
"And who might this be?"
He must not have been there earlier, or he wouldn’t have needed to ask.
I held out my hand first. "Good to meet you. I’m Han Miru, co-CEO of Continue Capital."
He looked faintly surprised.
"I’m Leonard Chang, CEO of Newcurrency Enterprise."
I knew the name.
He was famous, in my previous life as well as this one.
"I’ve heard a lot about Continue Capital."
"I’ve heard plenty about you too."
Leonard Chang was a businessman from Hong Kong. He had gotten into Vantcoin relatively early and fallen headfirst into the appeal of blockchain. From there, he built a new algorithm to create coins and then built his own exchange where people could trade them. That exchange was the world’s largest cryptocurrency platform, Coinmax.
It was still privately held, but there were already predictions that if it ever went public, its valuation would be at least $200 billion. The largest shareholder, with 85 percent of the company, was Newcurrency Enterprise—Leonard Chang’s private investment firm.
Even that was impressive, but in fact the biggest chunk of his fortune wasn’t Coinmax shares at all. It was cryptocurrency itself.
Back when people still barely knew what cryptocurrency was, or even what blockchain meant, he had been buying up Vantcoin and Elderium, and he had run the world’s largest mining farm in China. On top of that, Coinmax had issued a number of its own coins.
If you added all that together, didn’t his net worth easily clear $250 billion?
That was why there were unofficial whispers that he was the richest man in the world.
Come to think of it, it was almost absurd. Even with the money I had made by using future knowledge, it still felt comparable to what he had earned from exchanges and cryptocurrency.
Even after the introductions, he showed no sign of leaving and kept talking to Sara.
"I heard you were staying in Riyadh until recently. I’d love to visit someday myself. As for the crown prince and Neom City construction... "
His expression and tone were confident, but there was a faint air of flirtation to him.
"You two go ahead and talk. I’m going to say hello to a few people."
Sara said that and excused herself.
Was she seriously dumping this on me?
Leonard watched her retreating back and said, "She’s truly an incredible woman. Beautiful, intelligent, and strong."
"I think so too."
He looked at me and asked, "Continue Capital is famous for making good investments. What do you think about cryptocurrency?"
"I think it’s a good investment."
When Vantcoin and Elderium first appeared, established investment firms were skeptical. What value could there possibly be in a currency made of digital code?
But now even long-established investment houses were buying Vantcoin and launching related products. Derivatives and futures markets had sprung up around cryptocurrency as well. By this point, it was fair to say it had entered the system, at least to some extent.
Of course, plenty of people still looked at it with suspicion. Aaron Whiteman, for one, had once gone so far as to call cryptocurrency the worst Ponzi scheme in human history.
"When I was still aiming to start a business, I happened to hear about Vantcoin through a friend. After that, I got completely hooked on blockchain technology. I went around telling everyone I met to buy Vantcoin."
"Did people actually listen to you?"
At that, he laughed.
"Ninety-nine percent of them ignored me. But the ones who bought even ten dollars’ worth had their lives changed by it."
Back when Vantcoin was still young, programmers treated it like little more than a novelty toy. Then someone decided to use it to order pizza. He posted online that he would give 10,000 Vantcoin to whoever would send him two pizzas.
Someone saw the post, ordered the pizzas, and got the 10,000 Vantcoin.
At the time, 10,000 Vantcoin was worth about forty dollars.
Less than ten years later, the same 10,000 Vantcoin was worth about $400 million—roughly 45 billion won.
If you had bought just ten dollars’ worth back then, you’d be sitting on a hundred million dollars now. Even if you bought a little later than that, you would still have made tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions.
It was the kind of money that could truly change your life.
"Continue Capital’s reports have said it many times: everything is going to become digital. I think currency will too. Many countries will start adopting cryptocurrency aggressively in the years ahead."
El Salvador and the Central African Republic had even adopted Vantcoin as legal tender.
But that wasn’t what he meant when he talked about using Vantcoin or Elderium instead of the euro or the dollar.
"Are you talking about CBDCs?"
"Exactly."
CBDC, or Central Bank Digital Currency, was exactly what the name said: a digital currency issued by a central bank. In other words, instead of printing money in the traditional way, the government would mint an equivalent amount of cryptocurrency and circulate it.
You could think of it as a won or a dollar built on blockchain technology.
"CBDCs have a lot of advantages. They don’t need to go through banks, so payments can be made anytime. Processing is faster, management costs go down, and they’re safe from cyberattacks like ransomware. Transactions can also be made transparent, and counterfeit bills can be prevented."
One reason many countries refused to recognize cryptocurrency as an asset, or tried to regulate it, was that it lay outside state control. As the Blackwood incident had shown, criminals now preferred cryptocurrency to dollars.
But CBDCs were a different concept from existing cryptocurrencies.
Where traditional cryptocurrencies championed decentralization, CBDCs were a centralized form of cryptocurrency run by the state.
They were issued, circulated, and managed entirely under government control.
In other words, the government’s control was actually stronger than it had been with traditional money.
There was no reason not to adopt it if you looked at it that way.
In fact, many countries—including Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Korea—were already conducting research and experiments on CBDCs.
But if a government wanted to issue and operate a CBDC, it had to work with a company that knew how to handle it.
How much to issue, how to circulate it, how to manage it—all of that.
It was like assigning a middleman the role of a central bank.
The companies best at that, naturally, were the ones that had already handled cryptocurrency circulation before.
For example, Newcurrency Enterprise...
He smiled with unmistakable confidence and said, "Soon enough, cryptocurrency will replace traditional money."
For some reason, what he said didn’t sound entirely absurd. He was probably already working with a few countries behind the scenes.
Right now, the Federal Reserve was the place that issued the dollar.
If the dollar were eventually replaced by a CBDC, wouldn’t Newcurrency Enterprise be able to take over the Fed’s role?
In other words, it would hold the power to mint the currency of the future.
"That’s a very interesting idea."
Just meeting him made me feel like coming here had been worthwhile.
Because I already knew how this story ended.
I looked at Leonard Chang and thought of what Senior Dongho had said again.
A salesman and a scammer.
So which one was he, really?