'Bachelorette' contestant's firefighter dad has retirement locked up in bankrupt crypto lender

The government can do little to combat shaky financial advice. A plethora of YouTubers, TV pundits and Twitter users offer up all kinds of financial advice at all hours of the day. Laws regulating crypto firms like Celsius are rather piecemeal and left mostly to the states. — Dreamstime/TNS

Chapman Shallcross had been burned before. Shallcross, father of current Bachelorette contestant Zach Shallcross, spent 34 years in the fire service, retiring from his job as a fire captain for the city of Orange after health issues caught up to him in 2020. The elder Shallcross considers himself a hands-on, blue-collar kind of guy, but when his reality-star son tipped him off to the world of cryptocurrencies, he quickly became fascinated by the technology's potential.

Now the elder Shallcross is one of nearly 1.7 million people around the globe whose assets are frozen in the Celsius Network, a cryptocurrency lender that promised to be safer than a bank. Celsius froze more than US$4bil (RM18bil) in assets on June 12. A month later it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, making it one of a handful of crypto firms to implode during the latest market crash.