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A 60-year-old Indian woman lost nearly $30,000 in a crypto investment scam after she was approached on the matrimonial site where she had registered herself to look for a life partner.
The con man told her that he was a US-based engineer and can make her earn quick profits through bitcoin investments.
Investment in Love Gone Wrong
According to media reports, the Mumbai woman, who is a retired executive from a private company, registered on a matrimonial website in early 2022. Soon, she was approached by a person on the site, and the two exchanged their phone numbers and started calling and chatting regularly.
In March 2022, the man told her about a cryptocurrency investment opportunity and how he, purportedly, was making huge passive incomes. He shared the phone number of another person and told her that he would guide her in making the investments.
Between April 2022 and December 2022, the woman invested nearly $30,000 (INR2.4 million) in cryptocurrencies through “the guide.” At one point of time when she had $62,000 in her virtual account, she asked “the guide” to help her withdraw the money. They told her that she would need to pay a currency conversion fee and taxes equivalent to $15,000 to withdraw the money.
While she was still thinking about what to do, she noticed that the duo had stopped communicating, and her virtual account had become dysfunctional.
At this stage, she approached the police and complained. According to the authoirites, a case has been registered under relevant sections of cheating, forgery, and criminal conspiracy.
Same City Another Incident
In a similar fraud, another Mumbai woman was duped of nearly $12,500 (INR one million) when she was looking for a work-from-home opportunity and was asked by the fraudsters to invest in bitcoins. The 49-year-old victim realized that she was being cheated when she was asked to pay close to $10,000 (INR 0.8 million) just to withdraw her money.
India has reported quite a few crypto scams in the recent past. And in most of these cases, investors’ lack of knowledge about crypto investments has made them vulnerable to fraud.
More Instances
Early this month CryptoPotato reported that an Indian student committed suicide by hanging himself after losing $2,400 worth of investment to a fake bitcoin investment scheme. India has a fairly big list of crypto scams to its credit.
Another recent example was the arrest of an accused in a crypto scam worth $160 million.
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