First of two parts
Cindy Tsai had her stomach removed in January 2021, after having been diagnosed with gastric cancer seven months earlier. Her husband of 16 years, who she hadn’t physically seen for three months before her diagnosis, had also decided to call the marriage quits from his home in Vancouver and never came to visit as she underwent chemo. The cancer came back in September 2021.
In other words, when “Jimmy” first messaged her on WhatsApp on Oct. 15, 2021, she was going through “the most vulnerable time I have ever been in my life.”
“Jimmy” asked her if she was Linda from the pet store. You have the wrong number, she said. But she looks Chinese, he told her, and he’s Chinese, too. The revelation of this shared origin — established through their little icons in the app — kicked off seemingly constant messaging and a relationship took shape.
From playful selfies to magazine-worthy photos of food supposedly cooked at home, Jimmy virtually opened himself up to Tsai and she figured she’d found a new friend who would always be there for her in her time of need.
As Tsai, a lawyer living in Newton, would slowly realize over the course of her three-month online relationship with Jimmy — in which she said she lost $2.5 million — she was one of the 415 victims in 2021 of romance and confidence scams in Massachusetts, according to recently released FBI data. The Bay State suffered the 11th highest rate of internet-related fraud, despite being the 15th largest state by population as of the 2020 Census, losing a collective $21.8 million in these types of scams alone. Nationally, about 24,300 people reported losses of $956 million to online confidence scams.
“These scams differ from others in that the perpetrator is preying on the victim’s ‘heartstrings,’ ” FBI spokeswoman Kristen Setera told the Herald. “A confidence fraud/romance scam is when an individual deceives a victim into believing that they have a trusting relationship, whether family, friendly or romantic. As a result, the victim is persuaded to send money, personal and financial information, or items of value to the perpetrator.”
The FBI is unable to talk about particular cases under investigation, Setera said, or to even confirm or deny whether any particular case, like Tsai’s, is under investigation at all. But the bureau’s Boston office, where Setera works, did confirm that 625 victims across their area of responsibility of Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island lost a collective $27,718,186 to the scams.
The most recent person to plead guilty to involvement in online romance scams in federal court in Massachusetts was Mike Oziegbe Amiegbe, a Nigerian national living in Dorchester. He pleaded guilty on Feb. 16 to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, a scheme in which the feds say he admitted to using false online identities to gain the trust of victims to scam them out of at least $550,000.
Tsai had heard about Nigerian scammers before and isn’t the type to fall for random strangers. She said that, before her illness, she had never opened up any random WhatsApp messages and that she doesn’t even confirm Facebook friend requests.
She’s a hard worker, saying that she logged 100,000 miles in yearly business travel before COVID struck, and, being naturally a bit risk-averse, kept her investments on the safer side. She said she had only grown wealthy “in the last few years for returns on (her) real estate investments.” She thought she didn’t really have time for Jimmy, she said, and repeatedly told him over the course of that first night that she wanted to log off.
But that barrier broke down. Jimmy was sweet and offered her plenty of emotional support. He’d message her to drive carefully and wear her seatbelt if she were going on a drive and would check in for results on her latest cancer treatments — she said her cancer continues to crop up and has become terminal — and loved to engage in long chats about anything at all.
“That innocent stuff went on for about 10 days,” she said, adding later, “That’s the kind of scary part about these scams, it’s that they’re very patient.”
After that 10th day, though, the conversation turned toward business. He claimed had moved to the U.S. from China as his family is in the clothing business, but soon after they set up shop in Los Angeles, the pandemic hit and they had to close. He told her he was now spending his time day trading cryptocurrencies online, something that he continued to tell her was lucrative and a much better return than her real estate holdings.
Setera said the FBI is seeing a “rising trend” in romance scammers using the allure of “substantial profits” from cryptocurrency, a type of investment novel to many targets, that will “never really materialize.”
Tsai resisted, but he made it very appealing through screenshots of his alleged crypto returns — she said she was also reading about gurus like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and billionaire Elon Musk going all-in on crypto at the time — so her resistance broke down again.
He introduced her to an online trading market, which was actually a fake front using a very similar name and look to a legitimate site. She was allowed to pull money back out in the initial days, all a ploy to convince her it was real. Jimmy even consented to a video chat, which she said helped assuage her suspicions over “red flags.”
But by the time it was all over, through all kinds of confidence tricks that made it look like Jimmy was helping her burgeoning crypto success by giving her “loans” and the like into the fake platform, she had lost $2.5 million.
Tsai was a victim of what the Global Anti-Scam Organization, a volunteer-run advocacy and awareness group founded in June 2021 by another victim, calls a “pig-butchering” scam, a phrase derived from a Chinese-language colloquial term for long cons like this one. The more than 40 volunteers in the group, it says, have lost an average of nearly $100,000 per person.
Tsai fits the profile of what the group says is a scammer’s perfect target: a relatively young, educated and successful person who is at a certain point in their life where they may be more susceptible to the types of kind words, attention and wooing these scammers specialize in.
Tsai hooked up with the group, which hopes to expose and educate the world on the growing trend of these scams originated by operatives in southeast Asia and offers a 24/7 support chat platform on their website for those suspicious of a new online “friend” or who have already been victimized.
“Our stories are severely underreported in the media,” a spokeswoman for the group wrote, “even though these scams are probably wreaking economic havoc on a similar scale to the recent wave of ransomware cybercrime.”
Tomorrow: Part II, how to avoid being scammed.
