Ben McKenzie suspected there was something suspicious about crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried long before anyone else did.

The actor known for Gotham and The O.C., who earned a degree in economics from the University of Virginia, turned his attention to the study of cryptocurrency during the pandemic. Unlike millions of others who have evangelized for crypto, he came to view digital currency as fundamentally unsound and rife with fraud – case in point Bankman-Fried, who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange that at one time was valued in the billions of dollars.

McKenzie wrote a book about it – Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, co-authored with Jacob Silverman – and as part of…