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ScamProof Consultants

ONE OF THE MOST COMMON SCAMS ⚠️
After two months, Tho Vu was infatuated. The 33-year-old customer service agent, living in Maryland, had met “Ze Zhao” through a dating app, and says she quickly began exchanging messages with him all day on WhatsApp. He seemed like someone she could rely on—he called her “little princess” and sent her reminders to drink enough water. By October 2021, despite never having met in person, they were talking about where to buy a house, how many kids to have, even how he hoped she’d do a home birth. “I want to take you with me when I do anything,” he said, in messages seen by TIME. “You are as important [to me] as my mother.”

To fund their life together, Zhao pushed Vu to invest in Bitcoin. Vu was impressed by the cryptocurrency’s massive price gains. She was also reassured by Zhao’s suggestion that she buy her Bitcoin through Coinbase, an established U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, before transferring it to Zhao’s favored site. “Every time we did the trades he would repeat why we were doing it,” says Vu now. “It was always, ‘babe, we’re doing this for our future’.”

Only when Vu tried to withdraw her gains did she realise that Zhao was a fiction—and so was that trading site. She’d been sending those tokens straight to a team of professional crooks. It was a so-called pig-butchering scam—also known as a crypto-romance—in which criminals spend weeks or months gaining victims’ trust. Vu says she lost about $306,000, including her investment and additional payments she was told were fees and taxes by the fake exchange. “That was one of the most traumatic events in my life,” says Vu. “Not only had I lost all my savings, but this future that I thought would be a new adventure—it was all a lie.”