Crypto scammers snare victims with fake love
– The “wine trader” wooed her online for months with his flirtatious smile and emoji-sprinkled texts. Then he went for the kill, defrauding the Philadelphia-based tech professional out of $450 000 (about R8.6 million) in a cryptocurrency romance scam.
The con, which drained Shreya Datta, 37, of her savings and retirement funds while saddling her with debt, involved the use of digitally altered deep-fake videos and a script so sophisticated that she felt her “brain was hacked”.
The scam is known as “pig butchering,” with victims likened to hogs fattened up by fraudsters with feigned love before the proverbial slaughter – tricking them into a fake crypto investment. The rapid growth of this fraud, thought to be run by crime syndicates in Southeast Asia, has resulted in losses of billions of dollars in the United States.
Datta’s experience began on a dating app – Hinge, in her case, where last January she met “Ancel”, who introduced himself as a French wine trader in Philadelphia.
Datta said she was “charisma bombed” as the gym buff deleted his Hinge profile to give her “focused attention”. They exchanged selfies, flirty emoticons and did video calls in which the suave but “shy” man posed with a dog, later determined to be AI deep-fakes. They texted daily, with “Ancel” asking about little things like whether she had eaten, preying on Datta’s desire for a caring companion after her divorce.
Plans to physically meet kept getting pushed back, but on Valentine’s Day last year, “Ancel” sent her a bouquet and card calling her “Honey Cream”. When she sent him a selfie, he sprayed her with red kiss emojis.
Between the mushy exchanges, “Ancel” sold her a dream. “The dream was, ‘I’m retiring early, I’m well off. What is your plan?’” Datta, an immigrant from India, said. “He’s like, ‘I’ve made all this money investing. Do you really want to work till you’re 65?’”
He sent her a link to download a crypto trading app with two-factor authentication to make it appear legitimate and showed her what he called money-making trades through screenshots.
Datta converted some of her savings into cryptocurrency on the US-based exchange Coinbase and the fake app initially allowed her to withdraw her early gains. “Ancel” egged her on to invest more, take out loans and use her retirement fund.
By March, Datta’s nearly $450 000 investment had more than doubled on paper, but alarm bells went off when she tried to withdraw it and the app demanded a personal “tax”.
Her London-based brother did a reverse image search of the pictures of “Ancel” and found they were of a German fitness influencer. “When I realised it was a scam and all the money was gone, I had proper PTSD symptoms,” Datta said.
The FBI said that last year more than 40 000 people reported losses of well over $3.5 billion from cryptocurrency fraud, including pig butchering. –