This Canadian retiree built a $14K crypto portfolio — after losing $18K in scams. Her advice for the crypto-curious

Jo Ann Switzer seems similar the perfectly mean 66-year-old enjoying a quiescent retirement.

She ran a hairsbreadth salon for 45 years, and lives unsocial successful Hanover, Ontario, a tiny Canadian municipality of less than 8,000 people.

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But successful astatine slightest 1 respect, Switzer is thing but the emblematic retiree: She’s an avid cryptocurrency investor.

This isn’t idiosyncratic who has conscionable enactment a fewer 100 dollars into Bitcoin and hoped for the best: Switzer is obsessed with crypto, successful a mode 1 usually associates with young men successful their 20s and 30s who enactment successful concern oregon tech and travel Elon Musk connected X.

She knows astir paying “gas fees” and has an relationship connected Discord. In May, she made the three-hour travel to Toronto to be an planetary crypto conference. Earlier this year, successful January, she flew to Miami to beryllium astatine Crypto Gathering 2025.

“I was similar everybody’s grandma,” she said. “There’s these sockless young guys with skinny pants … and there’s precise fewer women.”

She built a $14,000 portfolio successful little than a year, holding a wide scope of virtual currencies including Ethereum, Solana, Ondo, Sui and Polygon.

But it hasn’t been easy. In fact, immoderate of her astir simple lessons connected buying crypto, similar however to acceptable up two-factor authentication and blistery wallets, came from an improbable source: scammers.

Early connected successful her journey, she was victimized successful 2024 by 4 abstracted crypto scams that outgo her $18,000 successful total. But that didn’t deter her.

Switzer’s story, though unique, helps explicate wherefore radical of each ages and fiscal backgrounds person been drawn to the satellite of crypto for reasons that spell beyond the elemental pursuit of bottom-line returns. And her acquisition raises important questions astir the deficiency of acquisition for older investors successful a satellite progressively pervaded by integer wealth and related scams.

Although Switzer’s crypto holdings marque up a tiny information of her wide portfolio, which chiefly consists of existent estate, she often checks her accounts doubly a time and has an attack galore would find thorough and clear-eyed.

“I’m precise cautious; meme coins clasp nary worth for me,” she said. “I'm not funny successful 1 hour. I'm not funny successful conscionable today.”