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Dating Apps Are a Crypto Scammer’s Paradise

NEFTURE SECURITY I Blockchain Security
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Coinmonks
16 min read
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Feb 13, 2024

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The season of love is here, the countdown to Valentine’s Day is almost up. Channeling our inner Valentine’s Grinch, we have come to rain down on your love parade!

But it’s all for your own good, we swear!
Valentine’s and Christmas’ seasons are sensitive periods for people in search of their other halves.
That’s why they are the favorite seasons for dating apps!
Newcomers will dip their toes in for the first time, the regulars will be even more active in finding their soulmates, while those who swore they would never ever go back to these dumping hells, will cave in and download them again.
But this time around, when they swipe right, they may fall heart-first into the hands of a crypto fraudster who will leave them both financially ruined and heartbroken.
Pig-butchering scams are a type of crypto scam that is primarily a romance scam but operates on an industrial scale and whose working force has been mainly tricked into cyber salvery.

Cyber Slavery, a Multi-Billion $ Crypto Scam Industry & the Chinese Mob?

Tens of thousands of human-trafficked victims forced under threat of torture, sexual abuse, and death to scam people…
medium.com

According to reports by the FBI, in the U.S. alone, over $3.5 billion was lost by just over 40,000 victims in 2023!
These mind-blowing figures are only the tip of the iceberg; they do not even account for crypto romance scams that are not pig-butchering, nor do they cover the full extent of the damage and victims linked to pig-butchering.
Now, far from us is the idea of dissuading you from deep diving into the tumultuous waters of romantic love and dating apps to discover your soulmate!
Nevertheless, we would rather see you swim through them than drown in them, so today we will uncover the techniques used by those crypto romance scammers.
The key to understanding why crypto romance scams can rake in so much and how to successfully avoid them is to grasp that although they may seem very simplistic at first glance, they are actually very sophisticated in their psychological manipulation strategy as well as the tools they use.
The modus operandi of most crypto romance scams today, particularly pig-butchering, bears no resemblance to the days of the Nigerian prince in need of your “love.”

Faking The Real

“Not once did I think she was a fake person”

T
hose words keep coming back testimonies after testimonies of crypto scam victims.
This unwavering belief that their fake girlfriend or boyfriend was real always traces back to one or multiple video chats with their scammers:

“So about a month ago I matched with this attractive female on a dating app [..] Not once did I think she was a fake person we talked a lot a lot. we even video chatted over WhatsApp a lot, she didn’t ask me for money nor any sensitive info. “— Victim from undisclosed dating app
“This girl was from Thailand and apparently also lived in the US from time to time, traveling for work. After video chatting and gaining my trust, she offered to show me a website where I could trade using buy “ signals .“” — A victim ensnared through TanTan Dating APP
“Hello everyone, I use TanTan for dating and I met someone and we hit it off. I added her on my WhatsApp. Shes real, we have made video calls” — A victim ensnared through TanTan Dating APP

Video chatting was key in building the trust because you can’t fake a live video chat, right?
The answer to this question is both right and wrong.
We’re not questioning that a real human being was behind the camera during their calls, but these individuals were highly likely not their (fake) lovers, nor their scammers.
You see, romance fraudsters, which operate at an industrial scale, have known since we entered the 2020s that the ability to video chat has become the key component in nurturing or breaking the trust necessary to fleece their victims.
So not only do those scammers make it possible for their victims to video chat with their ‘lovers,’ but they also initiate this step first to nip any suspicions in the bud from their targets.
These ‘fake’ lovers are paid and enslaved ‘actors’ recruited to do just that.
They work in tandem with the lead scammer in charge of entrapping the victim through their text message exchanges in industrial scam compounds
“A photo from inside a [Pig Butchering] scam center in Cambodia. The group chat on the computer screen provides scamming tips. ” PHOTO: CHINESE-CAMBODIA CHARITY TEAM I source
The actors are kept in the loop and step in when needed.
The larger the bank account of their victims, the more likely they are to be mobilized to sell the scam.
Although it may appear extravagant for some fraudsters to invest in actors, expensive clothes and accessories, as well as rental apartments worldwide, this is a yearly multibillion-dollar business.
Their scam costs are but a drop in the ocean of stolen funds they swim in, especially when most of their workforce is enslaved.
For fraudsters who operate as part of a low-scale romance scam syndicate and do not have the logistical means to have English (or other foreign languages) speaking actors on hand, a simple trick they use is to resort to generating fake pictures.
In a report by Propublica, a human-trafficked victim forcibly recruited as a pig-butchering scammer reported that:

“ His operation bought photos and videos from websites that cater to such operations. For example, bundles of hundreds of photos of good-looking women and men are available for less than the cost of a cup of coffee from a shop called YouTaoTu.”

One almost-victim recounted that the scammers who chatted her up had ‘candid-looking pictures’ that she had ‘reverse-searched with no results.’
By generating imagery of a brand new person, rather than stealing pictures of an existing person as was common in the past, which could be debunked with a simple reverse image search, they successfully leap over the first trust hurdle!
Sometimes they will be able to make use of staff who are in charge of audio recording in different languages, but sometimes not, and with just fake generated pictures, they can still drain their victims of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
How is it even possible?
First, the romance scams operate on a very short time frame, ranging from just days to multiple weeks. It can last for months, in fact, as long as the victim keeps pouring money into the crypto scam. The reason is obviously because it’s time and cost-saving for the fraudsters, but that’s also an aspect that works in their favor as the shorter the timeframe, the less likely the victims will spot discrepancies that would alert them to the ongoing scam.
Secondly, and most importantly, they master psychological manipulation.

The Perfect Boyfriend/Girlfriend Tailormade For You

If
you, the reader, or I decided to recruit an actor to pose as our fake persona and get this whole crypto romance scam going, getting rich quickly but illegally, our chance of succeeding would be below zero.
We would also probably go bankrupt paying our posing actor for months before admitting that, well, it was not as easy as it seemed.
See, romance scam victims, in fact, scam victims as a whole, are always portrayed as absolute ditzes who cannot rub two of their neurons together.
Nothing could be farther from the truth; scam victims are not stupid.
Professional scammers are highly intelligent and skilled in the field of psychological manipulation.
Romance scammers are masters at their craft.
They take what makes us humans and use it against us.
They have a deep understanding of human psychology, built on years of tests and learning experiences.

“There is no unscammable person. Only scripts that don’t fit.”

This eye-opening quote comes straight out of one of the many “detailed, psychologically astute training materials” given to human-trafficked victims involved in pig-butchering scams. . It’s a kind of 101 guide on “How to Build Trust to Better Betray” or “How to Seduce Away Money from People for Dummies.”
The fraud they build is “socially engineered to enhance compliance, in which a scammer may pretend to be a friend [or a lover] over a course of many months, building trust and creating plausible scenarios,” says Martina Dove in her book “The Psychology of Fraud, Persuasion, and Scam Techniques.”
They adapt quickly to current events and are inventive in designing scams that vary in narrative and are highly persuasive,” she adds.

“I never had a long-distance communication/relationship. I always dated locally, and I always thought that long distance would never work.
But her enthusiasm and the conversations that went on for hours a day really changed my mind.” — Anonymous crypto romance scam victim

Their aim in romance scams is to create the perfect soulmate for you. For this end, they mobilize multiple tools and manipulation tactics.
First, they have to create an attractive online persona from scratch to woo their targets online.
Their persona is built regardless of their own gender; in one conversation, they could be a man, in another, a woman.
The persona has to be wealthy:

• The best way to be believable when dangling the get-rich-quick carrot is to avoid fostering suspicion from the victim.
• They will be less likely to think that the trap is a scheme if they believe their scammer does not need their money.
• MOST IMPORTANTLY (unfortunately), rich people are perceived as “more trustworthy” (Perceived Socioeconomic Status Modulates Judgments of Trustworthiness and Trust Behavior Based on Facial Appearance Front Psychol. 2018; 9: 512.)

To catch their victims, the romance scammers will:

“ […] bolster them with the simulacrum of an affluent lifestyle by posting photos of luxury cars, along with descriptions of relevant hobbies such as investing. Stressing your belief in the importance of family, one guide adds, is the sort of touch that helps foster trust.”- Propublica

“When future victims engage with the scammers, to again avoid raising suspicion, the on-and-off conversation will be pretty light. At some point, they will try to engage them in more and more intimate conversation topics.
Obviously, this is to nurture the fake relationship, but more importantly, so they can get to know their victims and the ‘pain points that can be exploited”.
They also do “customer mapping”:“screening potential marks to glean information on their wealth and vulnerability to being “cut” slang for convincing them to fall for the scheme.”
They would send fake photos, videos of them,… and some scam centers, as we saw earling, even have staff on hand to provide recorded voice memos in perfectly fluent English or video calls.
The main reason they succeed in uncovering people’s vulnerabilities and secrets in such a short period is that the scammers pose as empathetic, sympathetic, caring, and benevolent listeners.
Unfortunately, humans apparently have also a propensity for dumping secrets or trauma onto strangers:
Studies by Harvard sociologist Mario Luis Small underscores that as opposed to the common belief that we share our feelings about the most important aspects of our lives “with the few people we know best: family, lovers, close friends, our interactions often don’t fit this model at all. […] When asked who they’d most recently confided in, almost half the respondents said it wasn’t someone important to them, but a bartender, hairdresser — or maybe you, trapped in the window seat on a six-hour flight.”
As Olivier Burkeman put it:

“Sometimes we seek out non-intimates precisely because they’re non-intimate. For one thing, you’re not going to discuss your extramarital affair with your spouse”.

After the romance scammers learn all they need to know about their victims, they will create a script that is tailor-made for them. They’re going to fake going through the same hurdles or hurts or traumas as them, to create an even deeper and soulful connection between them.
Concomitantly, they will use the 101 technique of romance scammers and cults alike: love bombing.
Love bombing is a manipulation tactic to exert control over their victims by overwhelming them with affection, attention, declarations of love, promises of a future together and praise in order to quickly build a deep emotional connection, gain their trust and ultimately be more susceptible to manipulation and exploitation.
One victim confided:

I should’ve recognized the red flags when they both seemed to moving very quickly on the emotional side despite never meeting in person. They would call me names like “wife” and “my love” and express their love to me in an absurdly short amount of time. They would talk about their future plans with me like having a vacation home in Hawaii and traveling all over the world. It seemed too good to be true, and it was. Eventually, they would ask for nudes and I’m not sure if this is all a part of blackmailing me in the case they got caught. — An Anonymous Victim of Crypto Scam

When they feel that their victim has been successfully hooked, it’s time for the slaughter to begin.

Laying the Trap For The Crypto Scam

W
hen the time comes for the victim to be butchered, they are convinced that their interlocutor is a wonderful, truthful, and good-natured person they are lucky to have met in their lifetimes.
In other words, they are ripe for the picking.

The Altercasting Strategy

To entrap their prey, scammers will often use a manipulation technique that Martina Dove calls “altercasting.”
They will let their victim in on a secret: their scammer has a rich uncle/aunt that works in a top investment group or in a space he/she has access to intel and thanks to their tips the scammer is getting richer by the day.
In Propublica report, one victim recalled:

“Weeks after first contact. One Monday in late October, Jessica told Yuen she had just made $100,000 trading gold contracts. She let him in on a secret: She had a rich uncle in Hong Kong who had his own team of analysts who fed her inside quotes about where the price of gold would move.
Every time “Uncle,” as she referred to him, called with news of where the market would go, she could make a guaranteed 10% profit by trading on his directions. Jessica offered to teach Yuen — but only him. “Why just me?” he asked. Jessica said it was because she sympathized with Yuen about his dying father. “The money you earn can better help your father,” she explained. Plus, she knew she could trust him to keep her secret about insider trading.
“Of course, I won’t tell anyone,” Yuen told Jessica as he pondered whether to join in.”

So, how does “altercasting” work?
Martina Dove revealed to ProPublica that “altercasting” puts “the scammer in a position of trusting the target so that the target will reciprocate trust later on. Keeping the trading secret also meant less chance that Yuen’s wife or teenage daughter would learn about his chats with Jessica.”
Now that the “secret” has been disclosed, the scammer will start posting screenshots of the huge amount of money he made following his uncle/aunt’s tips. And push slowly but surely the victim to deposit money on phony online brokerage/bogus crypto investment platforms.
One tool they use to reassure their victims is that usually the first step in the investment scheme they will need to take is to use a “legit” platform like crypto exchange Coinbase or MetaTrader whose app you can find on Apple and Android phones, they are then reoriented toward the funds-draining platform.