As romance scams hit an all-time high, one Tennessee woman has learned the hard way after losing $390,000 to an online con artist.
Nicole Hutchinson was gearing up to relocate to California after inheriting $280,000 from her mother’s estate following her death. She also sold her mother’s home and split the proceeds with her father, Melvin Hutchinson. With a comfortable nest egg, Nicole joined the dating website “Hinge” to make new friends ahead of her big move. That is when she began communicating with a man named “Hao.” The two bonded over being born in a small Chinese town, though she was adopted and brought to the U.S. as a child.
As they continued getting to know one another, Hao told Nicole that he was a cryptocurrency investor and said he could show her how to invest. The 24-year-old said she was skeptical, having never invested before. However, her new friend assured her that she would make a lot of money by creating an account on Crypto.com. Once she had the account, Hao sent her a link to deposit money, claiming it was a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Nicole began transferring large sums of cash and convinced her father to do the same. Once the account showed an over $1 million balance, she decided to cash out. The site told her that she’d have to pay a $380,000 “tax bill” before withdrawing the money. It was then that she discovered that the account was fake and all the money had gone into Hao’s pockets.
“He just kept saying things of, like, ‘Look at this money that can help support your family.’ Obviously that’s what I wanted to do,” Nicole explained.
Melvin consoled his daughter once he learned of the news, despite having lost all of his money to the scammer.
“All I could do was just hug her and tell her, ‘It’s okay. It’s okay.’ And it was hard. It was hard. It was, we lost everything,” he said.
Rich Sanders, a cryptocurrency scam investigator and co-founder of the blockchain investigation agency, Cipherblade, said that Nicole’s money started in legitimate cryptocurrency accounts but was transferred to Hao’s digital wallets via the links he sent her, CBS News reports. Sanders doesn’t believe that Hao worked alone. He believes that the man is a part of a scammer ring in Asia that preys on naive people wanting to make money with cryptocurrency. He believes that the ring may have stolen over $20 million in the scam.
Nicole and her father are a part of a $7.7 billion grand total that victims lost to crypto-scams in 2021. The father and daughter live in his RV and hope their story can save others from being conned.
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