Crypto Bounty Hunting - Romance Scammers

For those who don't know me, I'm a crypto bounty hunter I help victims of scams track their funds down and provide them the tools to make claims with the exchanges in order to have a shot at recovery.

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While working on behalf of a client, I recently encountered a scammer who managed to defraud my client of approximately $400,000 worth of Ethereum through a well-orchestrated act of social engineering. This unfortunate event started with a WhatsApp message from a stranger.

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After weeks of pleasant chats, the scammer and my client grew close, sharing photos and deepening trust. Then, the scammer, claiming a romantic connection, asked for a small sum of money. A red flag: they wanted cryptocurrency. Demands grew, with my client eventually sending $15,000. This continued for three months, resulting in a $400,000 loss, trully sad given Ethereum's value has almost doubled since.

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On the blockchain side, each payment was swiftly channeled into two secondary accounts. The first of these accounts converted the funds into USDT before forwarding them to another address. A waiting period of approximately five days preceded each subsequent transaction. This process was iterated for roughly a month until the stolen eth was eventually liquidated on Binance, for those who don't know scammers do this to make it more difficult for victims to make claims with the exchanges.

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The second address received approximately 20% of the stolen funds, converting them into a tokenized variant of Bitcoin, using the 1inch network. The funds were subsequently bridged to the native Bitcoin blockchain and subjected to multiple transfers before ultimately finding their way to a OKX account.

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Contrary to what many think, these investigations take a lot of time and involve complex rules due to the unclear nature of the situation and to the lack of rules in the space. In this case, local authorities asked the exchange for crucial info on account balances, transactions, and identities. But the scammers turned out to be from another country, so the case was sent to the FBI cybercrimes division. There's some good news, though – a few accounts linked to the wrongdoers have been frozen, which gives hope to the victim and other possible victims of these scammers of recovering something.

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As of this moment I have done all I could and the case is being investigated by the federal authorities, which are overwelmed with crypto cases since they have small teams for it. I'll update you as soon as I can - if I'm allowed to as I need consent to publish these posts -

As always, stay safe and Freak the scammers

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