Rick Jenkins, a detective with the Gilroy Police Department, a city south of San Jose, wrote in a May 13 search warrant affidavit obtained by Forbes that “an unknown suspect” met a victim on a dating website, and eventually “tricked the victim” into investing over $243,000 worth of USDT into a fake cryptocurrency exchange.
The seizure marks the first time that romance scam-related cryptocurrency losses have been recovered in this Silicon Valley county, according to Erin West, a veteran prosecutor with the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. Authorities are now beginning the process of returning the seized funds to victims.
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According to the Federal Trade Commission, losses from romance scams, many carried out using online dating sites, have “skyrocketed” recently, and in 2021, reached an all-time high, of $547 million. A subset of these romance scams involve cryptocurrency, and are sometimes known as “pig butchering” scams, in which victims are enticed to put in more and more money – fattening them up – before disappearing with vast sums of cryptocurrency.
Source: ‘Pig Butchering’ Crypto Scam Victim To Get Money Back From Binance, Law Enforcement Says
