My Fake Cryptocurrency Assistant Dumped Me
“Luna”, my fake cryptocurrency investment advisor, dumped me.
After hearing the news that Skype was going offline permanently, I logged into my account. I found a ton of giant group messages, many following a pattern: a “professor” would send cryptocurrency trading signals, and his “assistant” would help manage the communication. I decided to engage in one such group. “Shaun,” the professor, and “Luna,” the assistant, were joined by an enthusiastic claque of interested-sounding traders. Luna then messaged me privately, and moved the conversation to WhatsApp, for which I created a throwaway account on a backup phone.
Over the next several weeks, Shaun would send out signals, and Luna would offer help. Although I quickly left the annoying Skype group chat, I pretended to pay attention and sent Luna several confirmations that I was making money. Luna responded with heart emojis and even offered to reimburse me for any losses. The proposed trades were all for contracts for obscure cryptocurrencies that were so thinly traded, a small group of people could easily pump up the price, so that others could sell (or “dump”) their holdings to realize a quick profit. Luna and Shaun acted like they were offering advice out of the goodness of their heart, but they needed real people to make trades to pump up specific tokens’ prices, and they needed real money to flow into a dubious exchange web site.
Early in our chat, Luna had alluded to an “advanced” group for high rollers with at least $25,000 to invest. After a few weeks of pretending to trade, I asked about gaining entry to this group. Luna insisted that I send her screenshots from CKScoin, the amateurish-looking exchange that Shaun had insisted I use. I tried creating some screenshots using generative AI and the basic image manipulation on my iPhone, but Luna refused to accept them, and my ruse was finally exposed. Strangely, despite repeatedly calling me a liar (and me, facetiously, simultaneously denying and confirming this) Luna continued to chat with me. She even offered to keep giving me guidance, should I decide to fund a real account with real money.
Everyone needs to be vigilant about scams, particularly about cryptocurrency, which is very lightly regulated and is likely to remain so for the next few years. Pump and dump schemes are common, and can result in large losses for those left “holding the bag” when a scheme collapses. “Pig butchering” scams often start with group chats like this, or with an innocuous wrong-number text message. Victims slowly realize small gains from legitimate trades, then they get invited to an advanced group where more money is at stake; it’s so difficult to get money out, victims sometimes end up sending in more of their own money to get their own supposed gains. Criminal gangs in Southeast Asia, using forced labor, have extracted billions of dollars from victims in this way, and recovering funds is near-impossible; there are recovery scams that extract even more money from victims for “legal fees”, with the unfulfilled promise that a recovery scammer can get back a previous victim’s funds. I wrote about several such scams in my book, Personal Finance for People in Tech. Anyone, no matter how educated or how tech-savvy they are, is a potential victim.
Especially for folks whose investments have decreased in value recently, a get-rich-quick scheme might be tempting. Keep your strategy straight, keep your stocks app closed most of the time, and don’t take an unsolicited text message seriously.