NEW YORK (NYTIMES) – The man from the dating app Hinge checked all of Ms Tho Vu’s boxes.
He was a boyishly handsome architect from China, staying in Maryland on a long-term assignment. They had never met in person – he was still waiting to get his Covid-19 booster shot, he said – but they had texted back and forth for months, and she had developed a serious crush. He called her his “little sweetheart” and told her that he was planning to take her to China to meet his family when the pandemic was over.
So when the man, who went by the name Ze Zhao, told Ms Vu, who works in customer service for a security company, that he could help her make money by trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, she was intrigued.
“I’d heard a lot about crypto in the news,” she said. “I’m a curious person, and he actually was very knowledgeable about the whole trading process.”
But the man was not trying to help Ms Vu invest her money. He was entrapping her in an increasingly popular type of financial scam, she said, one that combines the age-old allure of romance with the newer temptation of overnight cryptocurrency riches.
Within weeks, Ms Vu, 33, had sent more than US$300,000 (S$407,600) worth of Bitcoin, nearly her entire life savings, to an address that Zhao had told her was connected to an account on the Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange OSL. The website looked legitimate, offered 24/7 online customer support and had even been updated to show Ms Vu’s balance changing as the price of Bitcoin rose and fell.
Zhao – whose real name could not be verified – had promised her that her 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,” he said, according to a screenshot of their texts that Ms Vu shared. But there was no honeymoon, and no crypto windfall. Instead of going into an exchange account, Ms Vu’s money went into the scammer’s digital wallet, and he vanished.
Now, she is struggling to make sense of what happened. “I thought I knew him,” she said. “Everything was a lie.”
Romance scams – the term for online scams that involve feigning romantic interest to gain a victim’s trust – have increased in the pandemic. So have crypto prices. That has made crypto a useful entry point for criminals looking to part victims from their savings.
About 56,000 romance scams, totalling US$139 million in losses, were reported to the United States Federal Trade Commission last year, according to agency data. That is nearly twice as many reports as the agency received the previous year. In a bulletin last fall, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Oregon office warned that crypto dating scams were emerging as a major category of cybercrime, with more than 1,800 reported cases in the first seven months of the year.
Experts believe this particular type of scam originated in China before spreading to the US and Europe. Its Chinese name translates roughly as “pig butchering” – a reference to the way that victims are “fattened up” with flattery and romance before being scammed.
Mr Jan Santiago, the deputy director of the Global Anti-Scam Organisation, a non-profit that represents victims of online cryptocurrency scams, said that unlike typical romance scams – which generally target older, less tech-savvy adults – these scammers appear to be going after younger and more educated women on dating apps like Tinder, Bumble and Hinge.
“It’s mostly millennials who are getting scammed,” he said.
