Limitations on crypto advice enabling scams to flourish

One of the requirements for an SMSF investing in cryptocurrency, said Mr Dell, is to have an investment strategy covering this asset class.

“This creates an issue because financial advisers are not licensed to advise on pretty much all crypto products, nor do many of them really favour them in my experience, although there are some exceptions,” he said in a recent webcast with Crypto Tax Calculator.

“Obtaining an investment strategy that states ‘we’re allocating 10 per cent to crypto’ is not something you’ll get straight from your adviser; you’ll have to do that yourself.”

While a lot of advisers have settled on somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent being an appropriate amount of crypto to hold in a fund, he said, documenting that and getting advice on that is still very difficult to do.

“A lot of advisers are just saying ‘no’, but the answer shouldn’t just be ‘no’; the answer should be ‘we don’t recommend it, but if you want to do it, we can document it properly’ because people are going to do it anyway,” said Mr Dell.

“The ATO is seeing a lot of scams in this space where people are putting their super in certain assets or certain wallets where they actually lose ownership of it really very quickly, and there are pretty disastrous consequences for that.”

Crypto Tax Calculator chief executive Shane Brunette said that at this stage, it’s still very much a case of individuals doing their own research and taking on their own individual risks.

“[Investors] need to understand from their own perspective whether its something worth investing in. Hopefully, that’s part of a diversified outlook where you’ve just got a small amount of funds invested with the hope of taking a view from a technology point of view that [a particular crypto asset] is going to be useful at some point in time and has core fundamental value,” Mr Brunette explained.

“[There’s still] a lot of people making money out of advice which perhaps they shouldn’t be giving in terms of investment strategies, and a lot of this leads back to scams. We see it all the time.”

Mr Brunette noted the collapse of Bitconnect in early 2018, which was shut down after regulators in the US issued a cease and desist order against it.

“A more recent example is the collapse of Terra in the US where we saw some parties saying ‘you can earn 20 per cent interest risk-free yield’. The whole thing then just collapsed to zero even though there were a lot of participants,” he cautioned.

“Looking at this from a technology point of view or even an economic point of view, it was fairly obvious that this wouldn’t stand the test of time.”

Mr Brunette said it is critical that SMSFs and other investors do a lot of research to try and understand it before investing.

“If you don’t understand it, it’s probably not worth investing in. A lot of the participants in this space tend to come from more of a technology background, or even economic or financial, so they’re fairly sophisticated users, and they can actually understand what’s happening,” he stated.

“It gets more dubious if you’ve got someone who doesn’t really have much of a fundamental view from a technology point of view, and they’re trying to form a view of a coin with almost no market value; most of the time, they just get burnt.”

He advised investors to avoid getting their information off YouTube to try and understand the technology itself.

“There is a lot of information out there because there are a lot of engineers and developers building these types of platforms, and they need to understand how it works and what’s going on, and that can really give you an edge,” he said.