I Bought James Altucher's Master Class on Cryptocurrency and I Immediately Regretted it

I’ve been seeing James Altucher advertising for his new masterclass for some time. Specifically, I've seen this ad on Reddit:

I’m highly skeptical of anyone in cryptocurrency claiming to give you great returns. After all, if you purchase ETH/DASH/LTC or god knows how many other cryptocurrencies in January of this year, you’d be up about 5,000%-10,000%. Doing nothing. Everyone is a winner today.

However, I wanted to be fair here to better understand what James Altucher was offering. So for the purpose of this post, I bought the damn course to understand what the product offers.

You might expect this to be a review, but it isn't. The next 10 minutes of my 'purchase experience' so influenced my decision that I couldn't possibly recommend this to anyone. Here's what happened:

After going though the normal lead magnet stuff (with claims of 81,465% returns, oh my), I put in my credit card details and signed up. Immediately upon clicking 'submit', I get another lead magnet page that I’m told to ABSOLUTELY NOT SHARE THIS NEXT PAGE WITH ANYONE.

This is a sales technique used to help to build trust. I'm being told a secret that only me and the publisher get to know about. Now that I’ve put in my credit card information (and it’s easy for me to upgrade), Doug Hill (the publisher of this report) wants to let me know about a super secret about the cryptocurrency space.

So returns of 80,000%+ aren't enough now. There's even a bigger opportunity to get in on the ground floor of some amazing cryptocurrency. But through some secret means... a glitch.

I’d like you to pause here for a second and just take a guess. What do you think this glitch is? If you had to guess, what do you think would be the super secret that was important enough to save until after the main pitch?

Naturally, they don’t tell us without paying for a lifetime subscription of only $250, but here’s a hint:

So apparently, there is some “glitch” in the cryptocurrency space that allows you to purchase ETH at 5% of it’s market rate. Notice the suspicious quotes around “buy Ethereum”. From just a cursory look, it sounds like they’re offering $15 ETH… but after reading further that’s not what’s happening… that’s just what’s being alluded to (I'm guessing this is intentional to throw some people off).

If this part seems suspicious to you, then the next section should throw up about a dozen red flags.

“I don’t want to bore you to death with the nerdy technical details…” I just spent $50 on a master class specifically to understand the technical details on how to make money. Why all of a sudden are we now light on the details? Up until this point, this page was suspicious, but now we're entering the 'clearly I'm being con'd' territory.

More about the offer:

If you’re waiting on baited breath for the answer here, I’ll spoil it for you. What the author is referring to is a cryptocurrency “hard fork”. If you've been involved in Bitcoin this year (2017), you've likely heard of Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold and possibly some other cryptocurrencies. The author was alluding to the Ethereum hardfork in June of 2016 that created Ethereum Classic. That is the 'buy Ethereum for $15'.

It’s true that hard forks allow for some impressive return on investments, but trying to sell ETC like you're getting in on Ethereum is just wrong. If I said I was going to give you one ETH and then ended up handing you ETC, you'd be out about 95% of the value you expected. Even worse, it's not like ETC has experienced any sort of extraordinary return compared to ETH (it actually did much worse over the last year). Same is true for BCC/BTG compared to BTC

Here's the finale to this pitch:

If you believe in this, then the reason why you can’t tell anyone about ETC/BCC/BTG is because there will be too much buying pressure. Let’s forget the fact that these hard forks were major news in the cryptocurrency space and that BCC rose like a rocket because of buying pressure beyond anything this audience could bring.

Let’s also not ignore that last line thrown in there. If you bought this master class, you are now part of an ‘elite’ group of investors who are smart enough to listen to James Altucher for advice. To get more value, all you have to do is to pay $250 for a lifetime membership to James Altucher’s reports.

So, I didn’t buy any further than this sales pitch, but a thought occurred to me: if I had upgraded, would I find another sales pitch behind another paywall? Maybe an invitation to an in-person meeting so James Altucher can tell me about the secret to crypto-investing? Who knows...

After declining the offer, I got sent to another sales page. This one I actually think is legitimately broken. All I want to do is login to see my materials. Instead, I’m being asked to sign up again for a longer subscription (no) with no other helpful details.

After hunting around the page some more, I went back to my email and found the link to the Master Class. After logging into the website, I was able to get to the course and start watching it.

However, from the introduction of Jame's course... it actually doesn't seem that bad. Yes, you can get a lot of this information elsewhere and it's not groundbreaking, but it's also packaged with a bunch of other newsletters, books and materials. It's an annual subscription program ($49/month), but it's not extraordinarily expensive like some of these programs tend to be. The problem is that everything up to this point makes me feel like I'm being duped. Everything about this sales pitch, from the cheesy advertising to the 'hard fork' glitch upsell, makes this seem cheap.

Here's the worst thing about this: the only people who would really fall for something like this are gullible people influenced by their FOMO. The whole pitch is designed to make you think that you're missing out on some great opportunity and if you purchase right this moment, you can make a killing. It's a profit multiplier not driven by creating great value, but by getting people gullible enough to buy in.

Regardless of the actual value provided by this course, I don't think I could recommend this. Nothing about the way this is presented makes me want to associate with Jame's brand. I can recommend books like Cryptoassets or Mastering Bitcoin to give similar information without the feeling of 'scamminess'. And ultimately, that overshadows any positives that could have come from this course.