The man from the dating app Hinge checked all of Tho Vu’s boxes.
He was a boyishly handsome architect from China, staying in Maryland on a long-term assignment. They had never met in person — he was still waiting to get his Covid-19 booster shot, he said — but they had texted back and forth for months and she’d developed a serious crush. He called her his “little sweetheart,” and told her that he was planning to take her to China to meet his family when the pandemic was over.
So when the man, who went by the name Ze Zhao, told Ms. Vu, who works in customer service for a security company, that he could help her make money by trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, she was intrigued.
“I’d heard a lot about crypto in the news,” she said. “I’m a curious person, and he actually was very knowledgeable about the whole trading process.”
But the man wasn’t trying to help Ms. Vu invest her money. He was entrapping her in an increasingly popular type of financial scam, she said, one that combines the age-old allure of romance with the newer temptation of overnight cryptocurrency riches.
Within weeks, Ms. Vu, 33, had sent more than $300,000 worth of Bitcoin, nearly her entire life savings, to an address that Mr. Zhao had told her was connected to an account on the Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange OSL. The website looked legitimate, offered 24/7 online customer support and had even been updated to show Ms. Vu’s balance changing as the price of Bitcoin rose…
