A couple from Eden Prairie, Minnesota are down nearly $10 million after one of them fell victim to a crypto romance scam over LinkedIn.
Police in the North Star State say a man was enticed by hitting the jackpot in a purported investment scheme that promised to pay out massive yields, according to a report from local publication Star Tribune.
The man reportedly met another individual over LinkedIn who sold him the idea of making big gains on an investment strategy and then “running off together” without his wife. He sent the individual a total of $9.2 million in 21 different transactions after continuously doubling down and topping off his deposits without his spouse knowing.
John Stiles, spokesman for Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said the amount lost to the scheme was unprecedented.
“No one in the office has heard of a crypto fraud case as big… In fact, their eyes popped when I told them the amount.”
According to the police, the suspects did not invest any of the man’s money, rather they used it to buy cryptocurrency for themselves.
The man believed he was investing in “Coinrule-web3,” a known fraud that pretends to use automated trading software to trade victims’ funds for big gains, showing them fake profit numbers on their screen while the real money is siphoned elsewhere.
The Star Tribune reports that the man’s wife alerted the police that he had been liquidating all their investment accounts for over six months, and had “called her in a panic” asking her to withdraw all their remaining funds so he could pay the fraudster a $2.8 million “withdrawal fee.”
Police determined that the Metropolitan Commercial Bank of New York City was used by the fraudster, and is commonly used in such scams and to launder stolen money.
Stiles says that Minnesota has already seen senior citizens lose their entire life’s savings and take out multiple mortgages on their homes to get more funds to deposit into cryptocurrency scams.
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