New crypto scam targets tech savvy individuals

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A San Fran­cis­co Exam­in­er report has revealed that two tech-savvy indi­vid­u­als were vic­tims of an elab­o­rate cryp­to scam that led to the loss of $2.5 million.

The report revealed that the scam tech­nique used by these mali­cious play­ers is known as ‘pig slaughtering.’

A pig slaugh­ter­ing scam usu­al­ly starts on dat­ing plat­forms or social media, where the scam­mers get in touch with their vic­tims. Ini­tial inter­ac­tions focus on build­ing trust and a rela­tion­ship with the vic­tim, which could take weeks or months.

The scam­mer con­vinces his vic­tim to invest in cryp­to, usu­al­ly through a dupli­cate ver­sion of a real cryp­to plat­form or by con­vinc­ing them to send funds to a wal­let address.

One of the vic­tims, who pre­ferred to be iden­ti­fied as Cy, lost $1.2 mil­lion after two months of cor­re­spon­dence with the scammers. 

Per­haps even stranger is the case of R, who said the scam­mer approached her on LinkedIn and won her over with a pro­fes­sion­al pro­file and being an alum­nus of the same tech uni­ver­si­ty she grad­u­at­ed from in China.

The con­ver­sa­tion soon moved to What­sApp, where the scam­mer worked her for a month before con­vinc­ing her to send funds to a cryp­to web­site. She lost $1.3 million. 

Speak­ing on her ordeal, she said:

I nev­er thought it could hap­pen to me because I use tech. I’ve writ­ten software.

The Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion has alert­ed peo­ple to the preva­lence of this type of crime. In April, it sent out a warn­ing about romance scams and pig slaugh­ter­ing, claim­ing it received over 4,300 com­plaints in 2021.

An inves­ti­ga­tor with cyber­se­cu­ri­ty com­pa­ny, Sift dis­cov­ered that 1 in every 20 peo­ple she inter­act­ed with on dat­ing apps in the San Fran­cis­co area was involved in the scam ‑an indi­ca­tion of how these scam­mers have been tar­get­ing a spe­cif­ic set of people.

Post­ed In: U.S., Crime, Scams

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