The Grotto: Crypto, NFTs & An Online Hellscape (Part 1)

A Little Bit Culty

Sarah Edmondson & Anthony “Nippy” Ames

True Crime, Society & Culture, Education

4.6 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2024

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode is sponsored by Better Help.

On this week’s show, we’ll talk to four people lured into The Grotto — a mostly online hub for digital art that turned into a kind of Ponzi cult with plenty of love bombing and possible fraud. Our guests — anonymous, but going by Charm, Kateryna, Shayna, and Fomo — say it all begins with Jaime Dubuar Dean, aka “@thr33som3s,” who is a supposed former professional baseball player-turned digital artist who used Discord to coerce people to invest in his NFTs. With each dollar spent on his art, he promised that his followers could get closer to him. Our guests will say that Dean used coercion, financial manipulation, and empty promises to draw them in. And then he took his power too far.

Our artists are mostly anonymous, but you can find Kateryna — and her incredible art — here and here.

Also…let it be known that:

The views and opinions expressed on A Little Bit Culty do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast. Any content provided by our guests, bloggers, sponsors or authors are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business individual, anyone or anything. Nobody’s mad at you, just don’t be a culty fuckwad.

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CREDITS:

Executive Producers: Sarah Edmondson & Anthony Ames

Production Partner: Citizens of Sound

Producer: Will Retherford

Writer & Co-Creator: Jess Tardy

Theme Song: “Cultivated” by Jon Bryant co-written with Nygel Asselin

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered legal, medical, or mental health advice.
0:05.2	The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast
0:10.0	and are not intended to malign any religion group club organization business individual anyone or anything.
0:17.0	I'm Sarah Edmondson and I'm Anthony air quotes nippy aims and this is a little bit
0:30.5	guilty a podcast about what happens when things that seem like a great thing at first go bad.
0:35.8	Every week we chat with survivors, experts, and whistleblowers for real cult stories told directly
0:40.8	by the people who live through them.
0:42.6	Because we want you to learn a few things we've had to learn the hard way.
0:46.1	Like if you think you're too smart to get sucked into something culty,
0:49.7	you're already prime recruitment material.
0:52.2	You might even already be in a cold.
0:54.0	Oops, you better keep listening to find out.
0:56.6	Welcome to season six of a little bit culty.
0:59.1	Seeking down to the depths of the ocean
1:05.0	hanging on to win my love.
1:09.0	I let go of it all that could leave, but I know. Welcome back everybody to this week's epic three-parter on a little bit culty.
1:22.8	Yes, this week's episode is, dare I say, a wild one.
1:26.4	We're delving into a community that's invisible to most of us.
1:29.6	It's on discord.
1:30.9	We have a discord account.
1:31.9	It's a little bit culty. You guys may be on it, maybe not. But not all discord. We have a discord account, it's a little bit culty. You guys may be on it, maybe not.
1:34.0	But not all discord is culty. Not all discords are alike. So it's mostly a messaging app like
	...

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