Between July 1976 and July 1977, New York was terrified by a series of grisly murders. Six people were killed, with seven others injured, as the killer primarily targeted young women and couples in parked cars.

The media called it the “Summer of Sam”. His real name was David Berkowitz. When the police knocked on Berkowitz’s apartment door to arrest him, reports suggest he simply said, “How come it took you so long?"

That very same question echoed around my head when I first learned about the NoSmokeToken, a cryptocurrency project that rewards users for posting anti-smoking and anti-nicotine content.

Let’s take a look at this Matryoshka doll grift inside a grift.

What is NoSmokeToken?

NoSmokeToken was launched on World No Tobacco Day. The blockchain-based token is designed to incentivise and reward individuals for anti-smoking and anti-vaping social media content.

It’s a mission-driven token, which is neckbeard for using the appearance of altruism to give purpose to the purposeless.

“Investors” can buy and stake NoSmokeToken. In other words, you can give them your hard-earned actual money in exchange for magic beans that you can’t sell. Earn enough magic beans, and you can win prizes like more magic beans.

Additionally, if you share motivational content about quitting smoking or vaping on social media using the #NoSmokeMovement hashtag and the official website link, engage with the community, or participate in campaigns, you can earn tokens for your contributions through NoSmoke airdrops.

Deja vu

If you think this grift seems eerily familiar, you’re not wrong. Last summer, we wrote about the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Global Centre for Good Governance in Tobacco Control’s (GGTC) desperate attempt to generate “grassroots” social media content by launching a content creator competition.

Drawing from a fact-free fact sheet, creators could compete for a top prize of $5000. The Social Reels Challenge produced exactly the sort of content you’d expect. As the late Charlie Munger once said, “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome”.

The NoSmokeToken taps into the same heavily incentivised “altruism”. But the grift works something like this.

  • Promise creators tokens to promote industrial-scale propaganda.
  • As the social media posts are inorganically spread, the crypto coin benefits from this free marketing.
  • Crypto speculators (aka degenerate gamblers) notice the hype and ape in.
  • The token inflates in value until it reaches a specific market cap.
  • The dev/s cash out their tokens, and the project goes dormant or disappears.

We’ve seen versions of this crypto scam happen time and time again. I’ve even seen people on Reddit say they’ve been rugpulled on five or six occasions. Greed does remarkable things to people.

But is NoSmokeToken a genuine project?

Reg flags

If the NoSmokeToken website looks like it was cobbled together quickly, it’s because it was. Granted, it wasn’t registered

on

World No Tobacco Day, but was made on May 25th, just a week before WNTD.

Naturally, the website owner has set the website owner details to private. However, per the website, the project has a founder: Kevim Flores.

Now, Kevim (with an “m”) Flores does not exist. Anyone who's spent any time around crypto won’t necessarily find this surprising. Typically, the devs cite “security” reasons for their anonymity, and not the fact that their crimes of premeditated.

Now, this Kevim thing could be a Nigerian prince type situation where the founders deliberately misspell words to filter out people with basic cognitive capabilities, until all that is left are pure rubes.

Details about the project are somewhat sparse, so I joined the Telegram group to stay informed about its progress. It’s not pretty.

Telegram

Nicolas Tesla is alleged to have once said, “You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension”. One look at the NoSmoke Telegram group suggests he was bang on the money.

The NoSmoke group an oddball mix of laser-eyed anime characters, NFT apes, and people who look like blowup dolls promising to pump the coin in Asian and European markets.

The twisted genius of NoSmoke

Incentising creators to promote your coin, under the guise of public health, is actually kind of smart because the cheap, lazy, slop content is perfectly aligned with sincere anti-smoke and vaping content pushed by health groups, NGOs, ambitious social media doctors, and the endless legion of Facebook moms and useful idiots who still believe EVALI was caused by nicotine vaping.

The bar for that content is so low that it’ll sit comfortably with WHO blog posts claiming that vaping takes your soul, or whatever nonsense they come up with next. In fact, if some of the NoSmoke-motivated posts are stupid enough, they’ll probably get retweeted by the WHO and its ilk.

Final thoughts

The crypto world moves fast. This will go one of two ways:

  • Social media will be inundated with financially driven posts by useful idiots that may be indistinguishable from the garbage that Bloomberg-funded bodies pump out daily.
  • The NoSmoke devs will get impatient and pull the rug from under the greedy investors in a matter of days.

Lying, fraud, propaganda, and cynicism are rampant in the world of tobacco control. They’re also the beating heart of a large number of Web3 and cryptocurrency projects. It’s a match made in heaven, unless you’re an investor or someone tired of low-effort social media posts. Then, it sucks.