Investment related fraud and romance scams

With the explosive growth of cryptocurrencies, the potential for high returns has attracted both investors and scammers. The decentralized nature of crypto and the often-anonymous transactions make it particularly appealing for fraudsters.

Crypto scams have increased by 900 percent since the start of the pandemic, according to the FTC. In 2021 alone, more than 46,000 Americans lost more than $1 billion to crypto-related fraud.

The most prominent scam by volume of monetary loss is "pig butchering" scam, which often combines both romance and investment related frauds.

Source: https://www.sbdcnj.com/2022/reports-show-scammers-cashing-in-on-crypto-craze/

In Pig Butchering scam victims are often single males contacted by attractive females over social networks. Often a fake social profile is used for a female bait showing lavish lifestyle. Scammers use various methods to win trust including regular video calls over WhatsApp, etc. and demonstrating love and affection for a victim.

A victim is usually groomed over a period of 2-3 months when a victim is introduced into crypto investment project, promised a high return and assisted in purchasing cryptocurrencies (often ETH or USDT), and then shown how to send funds to an address controlled by scammers.

A sophisticated investment scam usually provides scammer with his own account on their web site where his investments and unrealistically high returns are displayed to make him feel enthusiastic about larger investment. In order to win his further trust they let victim to withdraw significant amount from his total investment minus "miner fees".

After victim invests significant amount equivalent in tens of thousands of dollars - he is no longer able to withdraw unless he pays a high "miner fee". Usually an expiration period is placed on additional payment to put a sense of urgency into a victim and to drain even more funds from him. The end result is always the same - a victim looses all money "invested" into the scam project.

There is a lost list of crypto scams, which grows daily reported by many victims. Some but not all of those scams could be found here: https://dfpi.ca.gov/consumers/crypto/crypto-scam-tracker/

Crypto Help Center was created to provide help to victims of crypto fraud. We provide technical and legal assistance for individuals who have lost their crypto assets. We use our technical expertise to trace stolen funds from addresses controlled by scammers to a various centralized exchanges where those funds could be frozen using legal actions and over time returned to original victims.

We recognize there is a separate category of crypto scams who pose as crypto recovery services and charge upfront fees to the victims but never recover the funds. Thus we charge no upfront fees and only take our fee from funds recovered based on complexity of each case and clearly specified in our service agreement.

We are always setting realistic expectations for the victims - not in all cases the funds could be recovered and we can not work on all cases reported. The cases we do take we inform victim that it will take several months to recover funds if at all possible.