When Anne* found herself suddenly single and looking for a partner last year, her friends encouraged her to “put herself out there” with online dating.
To Anne’s surprise, she was matched with quite a few men, and not all of them seemed like the usual sleazy types.
“There were about four of them I was chatting with. They seemed business-oriented, mature, and just like gentlemen really, not so interested in sex,” she said.
They all had another thing in common, Anne said.
They all seemed very interested in cryptocurrency trading.
Anne now believes each of these men was a scammer.
But it was only one of them that would lead to her downfall.
“Looking back, it seemed like it was almost inevitable. I was just unlucky that the most articulate one was linked to me,” Anne said.
Brutal term for a brutal scam
He told Anne his name was Carlos*.
His family was Spanish but he was living in Sydney where he ran an importing and exporting business.
Soon Anne and Carlos were chatting on WhatsApp every day, sharing lots of personal messages about their lives.
Carlos would send photos of himself, what he was eating, and his outings with friends.
He was a persona, most likely created by multiple scammers working together in shifts from somewhere in Asia.
The scammers took their lines from written scripts specifically designed to manipulate the…
