Two Brooklyn women thought they’d found love connections but ended up matched up with a crew of cryptocurrency scammers who bilked them out of $100,000 each, officials said Thursday.
The women were wooed and talked into investing using phony crypto apps where thought they were rolling in dough — until they tried to withdraw their cash and ended up with empty accounts and broken hearts, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office announced.
“He was using actual financial terms, and he sounded legit,” a victim identified only as E said of the scammer she met on the dating app Hinge in a video shared by the DA office.
“The painful reality is he bled me out of money, it was over $106,000, which is a significant amount of money,” E, 41, added. “To just see that go away in seconds and not be able to get it back is gut-wrenching. It’s so painful.”
Brooklyn prosecutors shared the horror stories as it announced busts in a “pig butchering” scheme that saw victims scammed out of more than $4 million, with officials shutting down nearly two dozen web domains in the network.
“Pig butchering” gets its name from the concept of fattening a pig prior to its slaughtering and goes well beyond dating apps, with scammers building trust with victims through social media before referring them to invest through programs that show tremendous returns.
E’s scammer even coached her on what to say to Bank of America representatives when they flagged her account for making same-day wire transactions, she said.
“You don’t know what to trust anymore after you’ve been fooled so easily with this digital technology,” she said, adding, “And I even work in digital technology.”
Another victim, H, a 41-year-old from South Brooklyn, matched with a scammer on the dating app Bumble and said that she was trying to buy the house she once shared with her ex-husband.
“From that conversation, he told me, ‘Oh I have this crypto thing, you should put some money in it. I was hesitant at first,” she said, later taking out money, a personal loan and her pension to invest in the bogus cryptocurrency. In total she lost some $118,000.
“I did that and I saw the money coming. I was like ‘Oh wow, I could buy him out.’ My whole intent was to buy my ex-husband out of the house. I tried withdrawing the money and they kept denying it,” she said.
Sher victim, S, described falling prey to the scam as a “nightmare” he accidentally dragged his wife and other loved ones into.
The 51-year-old from South Brooklyn someone asking him if his money had been placed in the Federal Reserve System was when he knew he had made a terrible mistake.
“I knew that this was the end, that I had been involved in a major cryptocurrency scam,” he said.
“The actual amount that I sold, I traced it all down … nearly $400,000,” he later added.
The Da said Chinese and Russian communities in particular are being targeted by random text message invitations and social media advertisements.
As part of its recent crackdown, the office said it seized the domain coinformat.com as well as 20 other associated domains in connection with their investigation into the plot.
Three virtual servers hosting those sites have also been taken, officials said.
“Pig butchering is a growing type of scam that defrauds residents of Brooklyn and the entire country out of billions of dollars every year,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a release.
“Awareness and education are the first and best lines of defense against these prolific scams. Investment returns that seem too good to be true are almost always just that – fake. So, I urge everyone to be very skeptical of anyone who they haven’t met in person and who offers a lucrative investment opportunity in cryptocurrency.”
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