In 1996, the cellular phone industry lost $650 million to fraud. Criminals with electronic scanners could pluck your phone number right out of the air and clone it onto another device. Your bill would spike. You’d have no idea why. And if you complained, good luck getting anyone to take you seriously.
That same year, AT&T started running ads on New York subways, ferries, and buses warning people about cellular theft.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the technology.
If you were paying attention in the ’90s, you’d have been forgiven for thinking cell phones were a mess. Confusing billing. Rampant fraud. A patchwork of state regulations that couldn’t keep up. The concerns were legitimate. Real people lost real money. And plenty of reasonable observers wondered whether this whole “wireless” thing was more trouble than it was worth.
THE SKEPTICS HAD A POINT
The people who were wary of early cell phones weren’t being paranoid. They were paying attention.
The cloning epidemic was genuinely bad. Fraud losses climbed year after year. Prosecutors like Roseanna DeMaria left the New York County District Attorney’s office to lead AT&T’s anti-fraud efforts. At the time, the cellular world was widely seen as a playground for drug dealers and organized crime. DeMaria’s team worked with police in Jacksonville to take down a ring that included murderers and narcotics traffickers, all of them using cloned phones to run their operations.
So when your uncle told you in 1995 that he didn’t trust cell phones, he wasn’t crazy. He had a point.
THEN THE INDUSTRY FIGURED IT OUT
The cell phone industry fought back.
Carriers developed authentication systems that changed codes every few minutes, making cloned numbers useless almost immediately. They started flagging unusual usage patterns. Law enforcement coordinated across state lines in ways they hadn’t before. Eighteen states passed new felony laws. Fraud as a percentage of industry revenue dropped from roughly 4% to under 1% within just a few years.
And then the conversation shifted. People stopped talking about cell phone scams and started focusing on making the tech better instead, like reducing the number of dropped calls. By the mid-1990s, roughly a decade after the first commercial cell phone hit the market in 1983, the industry had crossed 50 million customers. The skeptics had begun to be overshadowed by the reality that the world had moved on. The benefits were starting to outweigh the risks.
Today, those same networks are the foundation for everything from mobile banking to rideshare apps. Fifty million has grown to nearly 5.8 billion. The skeptics weren’t wrong to ask hard questions. They just underestimated where the answers would lead.
THE PATTERN REPEATS
Crypto is living through its own version of the cloning era right now: hacks, scams, booms, busts. The concerns people raise today aren’t baseless. But they tend to underestimate how quickly the technology and its ecosystem are maturing.
Many of the arguments against crypto today are almost word-for-word the same as the arguments people made against cell phones three decades ago. It’s too complicated for normal people. It’s a magnet for criminals. The technology isn’t ready. Why would anyone need this?
And yet, one in five U.S. adults—and counting—already holds crypto. That’s about 55 million people. Pretty much the same number of cell phones in the early ’90s.They’re not all tech enthusiasts or finance pros. A third are women. Construction workers are more likely to hold crypto than those in financial services. More people who use crypto are over 55 than under 25, signifying that the tool isn’t just for younger digital natives, either. Americans across the country are finding real utility in something that used to feel foreign or fringe.
The response to crypto’s early ups and downs hasn’t been a collapse. It’s been an evolution. Custody solutions have improved. Regulatory clarity is finally emerging in the U.S. after years of ambiguity.
Consumer protections are catching up, too. The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, established the first federal regulatory framework for stablecoins, requiring issuers to back their coins one-to-one with cash or low-risk assets, submit to regular audits, and give holders priority claims in the event of an issuer’s bankruptcy.
The learning curve is flattening. And the technology itself is becoming integrated with traditional financial services and being used in the tokenization of real-world assets and providing new ways to prove ownership.
New technology is always met with skepticism—from cell phones to crypto—but transformative technology seems to always win in the end.
THE REAL QUESTION
The skeptics who dismissed cell phones in 1995 weren’t fools. They just didn’t have the full picture yet.
And if you’re curious about crypto but still don’t understand the full picture, you’re not alone. In fact that’s the number one reason cited by most people who have not yet tried the tech. That’s why we are developing free resources for people who want to learn more before taking their first steps.
Whether you’re crypto curious, cautious, or clueless, the window for dismissing crypto as a fad for fraudsters is closing. If history is any guide, understanding—not outrage—will determine who benefits from what comes next.
Stu Alderoty is president of the National Cryptocurrency Association.
