A new online dating danger: Carlo Handy Charles explains a complex cryptocurrency scam

Romance scams have been around for a long time, but new technology is giving scammers new opportunities to work their game.

“Technology has been this great tool that we have invented as human beings that has allowed us to be connected with each other. But technology, one thing that I’ve seen in my research, creates this false perception of reality,” Carlo Handy Charles, a McMaster sociology PhD candidate, told CBC Radio’s Spark.

“Behind my phone, I can tell you whatever I want.”

Charles has been researching financial fraud that uses dating apps.

He recently published a piece in The Conversation Canada about “pig-butchering” cryptocurrency scams, run by criminal syndicates that use scripts and emotional manipulation to deceive users.

Traditionally, romance scams involved a direct request for money after a certain time of building trust, he said. But cryptocurrency scammers usually don’t tell you they need money.

“Instead, they tell you, ‘Because we’re a couple now, we’re going to invest together in our future.’ Where the scam happens is when they actually send you a link to download an application that is supposed to be the trading platform on which the two of you, as a couple, invest.”

Not only has the method changed, but the target has changed, too, Charles explained. The typical victim used to be a middle-aged woman looking for love. Now, many millennials are finding themselves the victims of scammers.

“The reason they do that is because they know people are interested [in cryptocurrency] … When you’re dating someone who says, ‘I know how to do that, I have the inside knowledge to make it happen,’ you trust them.” 

Vulnerability and loneliness are two key factors in why people get caught up in these scams and we can see that in the context of the pandemic.

“One thing the pandemic has done is to isolate people from each other and to make us rely much more on technology to be in touch with each other,” said Charles.

But we won’t really know until after the pandemic is over how different groups of people have been affected. For example, single people who before the pandemic would rely on bars, clubs, or other social structures to meet people, what did it do to them when those social structures no longer existed?