Why crypto scams are driving an online crime boom—and how to outsmart them 📝 iododds
fter 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.
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—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.
into bailing out its Wormhole crypto platform after a massive hack. Meanwhile, the rush of everyday investors into crypto has created a wealth of new targets.Many people assume that cryptocurrency is so popular with criminals because tokens move anonymously. In practice, major digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Ether are actually very trackable. Every transaction is permanently recorded on a public blockchain—essentially a decentralized database.
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