He was entrapping her in an increasingly popular type of financial scam, she said, one that combines the age-old allure of romance with the newer temptation of overnight cryptocurrency riches. “I’m a curious person, and he actually was very knowledgeable about the whole trading process.”īut the man wasn’t trying to help Ms. “I’d heard a lot about crypto in the news,” she said. Vu, who works in customer service for a security company, that he could help her make money by trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, she was intrigued. So when the man, who went by the name Ze Zhao, told Ms. He called her his “little sweetheart,” and told her that he was planning to take her to China to meet his family when the pandemic was over. They had never met in person - he was still waiting to get his Covid-19 booster shot, he said - but they had texted back and forth for months and she’d developed a serious crush. He was a boyishly handsome architect from China, staying in Maryland on a long-term assignment. The man from the dating app Hinge checked all of Tho Vu’s boxes.

Nigerian whatsapp scams