Former stockbroker Jordan Belfort, infamously known as the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’, has joined Jamie Dimon in proclaiming that bitcoin is fraud.

Jordan Belfort has echoed recent comments from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon who asserted that bitcoin is ‘fraud‘, in a conversation with The Street. “I think he’s right,” Belfort stated, agreeing with Dimon’s much-publicized comments. “I don’t think that it is a great model.”

He went on to state that cryptocurrencies will gain a place in society, if or when they’re backed by a central government.

He added:

The biggest problem I see with bitcoin – why I would never buy it – is that they could steal them from you. They hack into your phone…I know people who lost all their money like that.

Belfort, now an author and motivational speaker, plead guilty to stock market fraud in 1999 and spent 22 months in prison as a part of his plea agreement. Belfort’s memoir ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ was adapted into a Hollywood movie directed by Martin Scorsese in 2013.

In his criticism of bitcoin – a decentralized currency independent of any central authority – Belfort said:

[Any] currency [is] always air I guess, when you think about it…But this [bitcoin] is specifically being backed by nothing other than a program that creates artificial scarcity. It seems bizarre to me that it can ever really be sustainable.

“Sooner or later, a central bank or a consortium is going to introduce their own cryptocurrency and that is what’s going to take hold,” the former Wall Street broker stated.

In concluding his thoughts, he added:

I’m not saying that you should or shouldn’t buy bitcoin. What I’m saying is I personally myself would be very very careful about investing a lot of money in something that could vanish very quickly.

Featured image from YouTube/Bloomberg.