Archive Episode: Woman’s Inheritance Wiped Out in Crypto-Dating Scam
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 980 Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After 25-year-old Niki Hutchinson loses her mother, she uses some of her inheritance to start fresh in California. Not knowing anyone, she does what many people do today and joins a dating app to make connections. She develops a friendship with a man named Hao and, in time, he offers to teach her how to invest in cryptocurrency. With some small successes and lots of encouragement from Hao, she dives in and invests her inheritance, plus some of her dad’s money as well. That’s when her friend becomes less helpful.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on The Perfect Scam. |
| 0:04.4 | He was the one that eventually brought it to me saying, like, have you thought about investing? |
| 0:09.4 | And I'm like, I don't even know where to begin. |
| 0:12.0 | With cryptocurrency, it's just so volatile. |
| 0:14.7 | I just don't know how comfortable I'd be doing it by myself. |
| 0:19.0 | And he's like, well, I could teach you. |
| 0:25.1 | Yeah. comfortable I'd be doing it by myself. And he was like, well, I could teach you. Welcome back to The Perfect Scam. I'm your host, Bob Sullivan. It's Valentine's season, and I wish |
| 0:32.4 | everyone finds all the love they're looking for. But you know, people who are looking for love |
| 0:38.3 | can be among the most vulnerable. |
| 0:40.3 | After all, every connection requires a leap of faith, |
| 0:44.3 | and that's one reason romance scams are so prevalent. |
| 0:48.3 | How prevalent? |
| 0:49.3 | The FTC says consumers have more than $1.1 billion stolen annually from them, about $2,000 per victim. |
| 0:57.0 | But there's even more bad news. Criminals are increasingly combining scams, so romance |
| 1:04.0 | scam victims are often steered into a crypto scam as well. And the ability to steal via |
| 1:10.0 | crypto makes these crimes dramatically more devastating, |
| 1:13.6 | as we'll see with today's victim. How does the crime work? Basically, after gaining the emotional |
| 1:20.4 | trust and romantic interest of a victim, the criminal persuades the victim to invest in crypto, |
| 1:26.5 | perhaps as part of a promised future together. |
| 1:28.3 | But the crypto site is fake, or controlled by the criminals, and they steal every virtual penny |
| 1:34.3 | deposited by their new lover. |
| 1:38.3 | The FBI started issuing warnings about what are now called crypto romance scams about three years ago. |
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