My dating match wants me to invest in crypto. Is it a scam?
Good morning dear, did you eat yet? 😘 Last night the gold contract gave me 12% again. My uncle is senior analyst at a Singapore firm, he sees the data before the market does. I can teach you, very simple. First time 500 USDT is enough to learn. Don't use the App Store version, fees too high, download here: mexc-vip368.com. I am not asking you for anything, the money stays in your own account.
Yes, every time. This is pig butchering: the person is not a love interest but a script runner, often working under coercion from a compound in Southeast Asia and rotating through hundreds of targets at once. The romance is the setup. The trading platform it leads to is a stage set that accepts deposits and never really pays out.
How to spot this scam
- They moved you off the dating app to WhatsApp or Telegram within days, then texted daily for weeks before money came up at all.
- A mentor appears around week two: an uncle, a boss, a quant analyst who sees the data early. You will never learn the firm's name. Every crew uses this device.
- The platform installs from a link, never the App Store or Google Play, and the domain is disposable: mexc-vip368.com, coinvex-pro.net. The names borrow a real exchange and nothing else.
- The charts only go up. No losing trades, ever. Real exchanges have red days.
- They approve one small withdrawal early, maybe $200, to prove it works. That is the hook, and the next deposit they suggest is ten times larger.
- The real withdrawal triggers a fee that did not exist before: a 20% tax bond, an anti-money-laundering hold, a margin shortfall. Pay it and another appears.
- Weeks of messages and no unscripted live video. If they do call, the lighting is flat and the mouth sync drifts, and they will not do anything spontaneous on camera.
- The account is not on any regulator's register. Pig-butchering platforms never are.
What to do now
- Stop depositing. That money is gone, and every new dollar funds the same crew running dozens of identical scripts in parallel.
- Pay no unlock fee, however it is described. The balance on that dashboard is a number someone typed into a database. There is nothing to release.
- Test the person properly on a live call: have them turn sideways, cover half their face with a hand, or hold up a note with today's date. Current deepfake models break on occlusion and on anything unrehearsed.
- Run their photos through Google Lens or TinEye, and through an AI-image detector such as Hive Moderation. A match under another name settles it, and no match at all can mean a generated face rather than a stolen one.
- Export the chat and copy every wallet address, transaction hash, URL and app name before the site is wiped. That evidence is what investigators actually work from.
- Check the platform against the CFTC RED List, then file at ic3.gov and reportfraud.ftc.gov with the wallet addresses. If the crypto left a US exchange, call its fraud line the same day, because funds still sitting there can sometimes be frozen.
What it looks like on your phone
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Private. Never sold, never tied to you.
Sources and reporting
Use official channels to confirm a suspicious request and report fraud.