Today, 'incredible' is used to express excitement about an event, an object or a person. We say: 'That's incredible' and we mean 'that's exciting'. However, it's original meaning was not at all exciting. Quite the opposite.

The original meaning of the word is quite obvious: it's the negative in- followed by the adjective credible. The word was originally used to mean something lacking credibility. It's what the modern expression 'too good to be true' means. If something was incredible, it was similar to unbelievable, because either the person spreading the news about the event/object/person had poor credibility, or the person organising an event, or making a product, or recommending another person or him/herself had poor credibility.

Charles Ponzi had no credibility when he set-up his fraudulent scheme. He used his job title as a bank manager to 'borrow' the credibility he needed. Bernie Maddoff did have some credibility, through his securities brokering company. However, it was the NASD presidency, that opened the doors for his fraudulent scheme.

As you can see, professional con artists pay huge attention in obtaining credibility. Excitement in investments is rarely enough for an investor to sign-up. And there you have numerous con artists in the crypto world, that don't even bother to make themselves sound just a bit credible: they don't provide contact details or legal entity information, they don't provide any document describing the terms they offer their services/investment, they don't bother to provide even fake testimonials.

Unlike the two professional con artists mentioned earlier, crypto con artists simply offer everyone the red flags to mark their operations as scams. And the fact that people fall for such scams, is worrying about the intelligence of our generation.