Crypto Scams Target Dating Apps


The guy at the dating app Hinge checked all the boxes of Tho Vu.

He was a boyishly handsome architect from China and was on a long-term assignment in Maryland. They had never met face-to-face—he was still waiting to get his Covid-19 booster shot, he said—but they texted for months and the girl had a serious crush. He called her “little darling” and said he plans to take her to China to meet his family when the pandemic is over.

So, when a man named Ze Zhao told Ms. Vu, who works in customer service for a security company, that he could help her make money by buying and selling Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, she was intrigued.

“I had heard a lot about crypto in the news,” he said. “I am a curious person and he was actually very knowledgeable about the whole trading process.”

But the man wasn’t trying to help Ms. Vu deposit her money. It imprisoned him in an increasingly popular financial scam, he said, that combines the age-old lure of romance with the newer lure of overnight cryptocurrency wealth.

Within weeks, 33-year-old Ms. Vu sent more than $300,000 in Bitcoin, which made up nearly her entire life, to an address that Mr. Zhao told her was linked to an account on Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange OSL. The website looked legitimate, offered 24/7 online customer support, and was even updated to show that Ms. Vu’s balance changed as the Bitcoin price rose and fell.

Mr. Zhao, whose real name cannot be verified, promised that crypto investments would help them get married and start a life together.

“We can make more money on top of OSL and go on a honeymoon,” she said, according to a screenshot of the texts Ms. Vu shared with me.

But he had no honeymoon and no crypto money. Ms. Vu’s money went to the scammer’s digital wallet instead of entering a currency account and disappeared.

Now he is having a hard time making sense of what happened.

“I thought I knew him,” she said. “Everything was a lie.”

Romantic scam – term for online scam that involves showing romantic interest in order to gain a victim’s trust – increased in the pandemic. So are crypto prices. This has made cryptocurrency a useful entry point for criminals looking to separate their victims from their savings.

About 56,000 love scams were reported to the Federal Trade Commission last year, totaling $139 million in losses. agency data. That’s nearly double the report the agency received the previous year. In a bulletin last fall, the Oregon office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned He said crypto dating scams have emerged as a major category of cybercrime, with more than 1,800 reported cases in the first seven months of the year.

Experts believe that this particular type of scam originated in China before spreading to the US and Europe. chinese name roughly translates as “pig cut” – a reference to the victims being “bloated” with flattery and romance before being scammed.

Unlike typical romantic scams that often target older, less tech-savvy adults, these scammers appear to be after the young, said Jan Santiago, deputy director of the Global Anti-Scam Organization, a nonprofit that represents victims of online cryptocurrency scams. . and more educated women on dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge.

“The people who get scammed are mostly millennials,” said Mr. Santiago.

Jane Lee, a researcher at online fraud prevention firm Sift, began investigating crypto dating scams last year. She signed up for several popular dating apps and quickly matched with men trying to offer her investment advice, she.

“People are alone due to the pandemic and crypto is so hot right now,” he said. “The combination of the two made this a really successful scam.”

Ms. Lee, whose company works with several dating apps to prevent fraud, said these scammers often try to move the conversation from a dating app and onto WhatsApp, where messages are encrypted and more difficult for companies or law enforcement to track.

From there, the scammer bombards the victim with flirtatious messages until they convert the conversation into cryptocurrency. The scammer, who appears to be a successful crypto trader, offers to show the victim how to invest his money for quick, low-risk gains.

Next, Ms. Lee said the scammer helped the victim buy cryptocurrencies from a legitimate site like Coinbase or Crypto.com and provided instructions to transfer it to a fake cryptocurrency exchange. The victim’s money appears on the exchange’s website and, under the fraudster’s guidance, begins to “invest” in various crypto assets, before the fraudster eventually misses out on the money.

What makes this particular scam so sneaky is how elaborate it is than the other. Nigerian prince scam formerly. Some victims have disclosed that they were redirected to realistic-looking websites with charts and labels showing the prices of various cryptoassets. The names and addresses of fake exchanges are changed frequently, and victims are often allowed to withdraw small amounts of money early, making them more comfortable to deposit larger sums later.

“This type of fraud is very labor intensive and time consuming,” said Mr. Santiago of the Global Anti-Fraud Organization. “They are very meticulous in their social engineering.”

Experts say that cryptocurrencies are particularly useful to scammers because of the relative privacy they offer. Bitcoin transactions are publicly visible, but since digital wallets can be set up anonymously, technically sophisticated criminals can hide the trail of the money. And because there is no central bank or deposit insurance to integrate victims, stolen money is often irrecoverable.

Niki Hutchinson, a 24-year-old social media producer from Tennessee, fell victim to a crypto romance scam last year. She was visiting a friend in California when she matched up with a man named Hao who said she lived nearby and worked in the clothing business on the hinge.

The two continued to message on WhatsApp for over a month after returning home. He told Hao that he was adopted from China; She told him that she was Chinese and came from the same state as her own family. She started calling her “sister” and joking that she was her long lost brother. (They video chatted once, he said—but Hao only partially showed his face and quickly hung up.)

“I thought you were shy,” she said.

Mrs Hutchinson inherited about $300,000 from the sale of her childhood home after her mother died. Hao suggested that he invest this money in cryptocurrency.

According to the exchange’s screenshot, he texted her, “I want to teach you to invest in cryptocurrency when you’re free, bring some changes to your life and bring an extra income into your life.”

He eventually agreed, sending a small amount of crypto to his wallet address, which he said was linked to an account on a crypto exchange called ICAC. Then – when the money appeared on ICAC’s website – it sent more.

He couldn’t believe how easy it was to make money just by following Hao’s advice. Finally, when he invested all his savings, he took a loan and continued to invest more.

In December, Ms. Hutchinson became suspicious when she tried to withdraw money from her account. The transaction failed, and a customer service representative for ICAC told him that his account would be frozen unless he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. His conversation with Hao fell silent.

“God, what have I done?” said. said.

Now, Miss Hutchinson is trying to get her life back together. He and his father live in their trailer, one of the few assets they have left, and work with the local police in Florida to track down his con man.

Ms. Hutchinson does not expect to get her money back, but hopes she will be more wary of foreigners who promise to help other people invest in cryptocurrency.

“You hear all these stories about people being millionaires,” he said. “I just felt, uh, well, that cryptocurrency is the new trend, and I need to get in.”



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *