My Adventures as a Crypto Bounty Hunter - Romance Scam Edition

I would like to start by noting that I write these posts to raise awareness and for that only, and so I never post victims’ addresses or scammers’ wallets as my number one priority is to not compromise any investigation or any victim’s privacy. I have a duty of confidentiality with my clients, meaning that all of the information I post needs to be anonymized. Additionally, if you want to find out how I started and what I do to help my clients, please check my earlier posts, it’s all there. So, with no further ado, let´s get into today’s story.

While working on behalf of a client, I recently encountered a scammer who scammed my client for around $700,000 in Ethereum – all using social engineering in a way that may sound very familiar to most of you. It all began with a harmless WhatsApp message, which led to weeks of just talking - I think we have all been there, excited to talk to someone who understands you and likes you for who you are – and eventually to deeper talks and sharing selfies and so on. After some time, the scammer decided to ask my client for a small amount of funds as they were basically dating by then, and my client sent her the money (first red flag is that she asked for crypto). After this, things escalated - the requests started being higher and higher and it got to the point where my client was sending her 15k and she was complaining that it was too little. This lasted for 3 months and, in the end, my client saw $700,000 gone from his bank account - even more sad is that this was when Ethereum was at the bottom and it has almost doubled since then.

On the blockchain side, each payment made was instantly funneled to two secondary accounts - the first swapping the funds for USDT, sending it to another address, waiting around 5 days and moving it again. This process was repeated for about a month before the funds were cashed out. I have recently found out that the scammers actually do this to make it harder for you to make a claim with the exchange in question as it’s harder for them to verify your claims. You can overcome this by providing them a transaction report, making it easier for them to follow the money.

The second address received around 20% of the funds scammed, instantly swapped them to RENBTC (a tokenized version of BTC) using the 1inch network, and afterwards bridged the funds to the BTC native chain, moving them around multiple times until the BTC ended up on a Binance account.

Contrary to popular opinion, these investigations are very demanding when it comes to time and, since it’s a grey area, the regulations vary a lot on a case-to-case basis. For this case in particular, the local authorities requested information to the Exchange, they got account balances, transactions, and identities, but the perpetrators were foreign nationals, meaning that the case is going to be escalated to the FBI cybercrimes. On the positive side, some of the perpetrator’s accounts got frozen and the victim might see some of his funds in the near future. As per arrests, I'm very doubtful they will come to fruition this time, but let’s see what the federal authorities say.

Police might not get them, but Karma will.

As always stay safe and freak the scammers.

P.S: If I have any updates on how successful the cases I write about have been, I will let you know. However, not all clients update me after they get my help, and for the ones that do, these processes usually take quite a bit of time to be fully resolved.