I tracked down my WhatsApp crypto scammers

I want to show you a kind of group chat I keep getting added to they all have names like VIP wealth crypto investment Elite Freedom discussion group with AI generated icons and dozens sometimes hundreds of members the more I mention these WhatsApp groups to other people the more I realized I wasn't alone I'm in the fortune Pioneer Club blossoming of knowledge Elite learning forums these weren't just unprompted messages they were entire conversations ations with pictures of fancy vacations golf courses fine dining luxury shopping sometimes even actual bags of cash and every weekday without fail the

group would fill with chatter about cryptocurrency about how The Insider tips they were getting from this group chat were making them tons of money I tried to ignore these groups for a very long time but for everyone that I left or reported another one would pop up in its place so instead of trying to ignore them I tried to understand them why am I and so many other people being added to crypto Trading Group Chats on WhatsApp and who are the people in them who keep sending all of these messages over the course of a

few weeks I watched a bunch of these groups operate and while each one had its own unique flare I started to notice a Playbook each group had a professor like this one Claire Thomas who would share investment advice that sounded vaguely professional and each Professor had an assistant like Daisy the assistant was the first point of contact for new members who wanted to start trading and they would regularly share a signup link to an investment website every morning messages from Members would start coming in saying good morning sharing lifestyle updates and eagerly a waiting what

they called trading signals from the professor basically instructions on when to buy more or less of a certain cryptocurrency eventually the professor would step in and share those trading signals group chat members would post screenshots of their profits the assistant would share the link for new people to sign up and the next day it would all just kind of start over again I wanted to know if any of this was real the pictures the people the investment sites my guess was no but I wanted to make sure so I started doing reverse image searches on

every photo in the chat some photos had enough Clues to tell where they were taken I matched this photo to this Resort in Bali this one to this mall in Dubai and this one to this Cafe in Shenzhen China others were from New York Los Angeles Napa Valley kind of these centers of global wealth and luxury then one by one I found where these photos originally came from Twitter Instagram Facebook always posted to the internet long before they were used in the group chat and always posted by accounts with different names than the ones who

would eventually share them on WhatsApp like this picture originally posted by this caterer in South Africa she has a web presence we can tell she's real A year later an account named Kaden Aaliyah shares it in one of these group chats so yes the people in this group chat were sharing images that were stolen from Elsewhere on the internet but what about the people themselves CLA Tom thas Daisy Carrie were they real from the gecko the way they talked sounded a little off Mr robbert signal has been issued Brothers you guys chat I'm going to

continue drinking okay making money is happiness I'm going to drive the kids to the supermarket to buy some make money you spend it in various ways just be happy I wanted to figure out who these people really were so I reverse image searched them too Professor Clare Thomas was actually a London based model named Tony P his assistant Daisy KY was Nur batur a Turkish news personality so madeup names with pictures of real people but others seem to be impersonating real people from real companies like yasmina the assistant for a group chat called Arc wealth

exchange 518 who appeared to be a real administrative assistant at ARK invest a real investment management firm I reached out to Ark and they confirmed that neither they nor their CEO Kathy would do any business on West WhatsApp which you know makes sense I kept going with every member of these group chats every photo every identity was stolen from somewhere else on the internet so yes fake images and fake people but what about the investment sites for that I had to learn a little bit about how to detect a fraud site fraud sites are often

very close copies of a legitimate site like here bitmart is a legitimate cryptocurrency exchange but bit sm- trans isn't I also learned how to use a Search tool called who is I could plug in a domain and see how long sites had been around if a domain was registered relatively recently and expires relatively soon there's a good chance it could be a scam so there we had it fake pictures fake people fake investment sites but what would happen if I clicked the idea of clicking on these links to see these investment sites was really really

really tempting but I was nervous to open them on any of my own devices so I set up a virtual machine basically an emulation of a computer isolated from the rest of my computer I went to one of the scam sites and made an account with fake information this was it every one of these WhatsApp groups I'd been added to was designed to get me onto a site like this and to get me to deposit money into it and to deposit money I had to send cryptocurrency to one of these wallet addresses that that's like

a bank account number for sending and receiving cryptocurrencies I used the site called ether scan to look up those addresses transaction histories and I asked the blockchain intelligence firm chainalysis to help me understand what I was seeing they told me that the address was relatively new and that the group was primarily cashing out at a large Global exchange if people trusted the accounts in this WhatsApp group enough to send them money I wanted to hear what those accounts had to say okay really quick before we get to that this channel is a new independent journalism

project we're going to be diving down rabbit holes and showing you the entire process of how we reported a story start to finish every single time if you want to see more stories like this you should subscribe for more and we're going to be supporting this Channel Through ads we're always going to be marking them very clearly so that you know there's no overlap between the journalism and the sponsor this is a story about one very specific kind of scam but obviously the internet is full of all kinds and you can't always do a whole

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a 30-day money back guarantee so there's no risk if you want to cancel within a month okay that's it back to the story with scam texts just by responding you're basically confirming that your number is real and scammers can then sell that real information to other scammers making the problem even worse so it's best never to respond but here's what happened when I did first I started talking to the assistants they all cut to the chase pretty quick trying to get me to register for an account on their site when I tried to stall I

got a message from a fellow group member trip ree who told me that he'd been worried about losing money but had made a bit of profit it was fascinating to see the different kinds of angles they were using to try to get me to sign up if huge sums of money were not going to change my mind maybe modest sums of money would if authority figures weren't going to change my mind maybe relatable figures would I didn't even know if these were all different people or if they were just one person with different phones different

WhatsApp accounts all texting me and after a while I wanted to see if I could talk to somebody on the phone most people said no but then unexpectedly one assistant Daisy said yes so I gave her my number and I waited for her [Music] call hello hi did I just miss a call from this number yes yes I called you it's Daisy oh we've been hi from yeah so uh you want me to call you right yeah yeah yeah yeah can you just tell me a bit more about what uh how all this works uh

yeah sure but you know uh actually because uh we have a lot of clients who prefer to communicate on WhatsApp so I can send you all the information and you can start by registering an account okay can can you remind me where you're where you're based out of is this an American company yes in San Francisco oh no way are you also based in San Francisco with the company yeah sure sure yes okay okay okay that's great so I will I will text you on what'sapp okay and can I reach you at this number again

if I have more questions yeah sure course okay and that's the 646 number yes yes I guess so okay okay so thank you for your time then okay great thank you so much thank you bye oh I was so nervous I was not expecting that I needed to talk to someone who could help me understand what was going on on the other end of that call so I reached out to Aaron West she's a prosecutor with react a task force in Santa Clara County California that fights cyber crime and she told me exactly what would

happen if I had followed through with what Daisy was asking so what's going to happen is she's going to direct you to take your money out of your bank and move it into a cryptocurrency [Music] exchange you're going to open a legitimate account at a legitimate exchange like coinbase or crypto.com and she's going to Now teach you how to change your US Dollars into a cryptocurrency and she's going to say okay now it's time to invest it in our special platform and you are going to be instructed on how to send your crypto out to

a wallet address that she will give you or an app that you can click on or what appears to be a legitimate investment site online you're going to see a shiny dashboard that's going to show you now you have $500 in tether in your account but really at that point your money is already gone these WhatsApp groups are the latest version of this scam but if you live in the US you've probably already been exposed to an earlier version random number texts if you respond to these texts you'll get this a flood of conversation designed

to emotionally manipulate you into trusting the person on the other end they're using your desire for connection for friendship or romance or professional opportunities to get something out of you these conversations can start over text dating apps LinkedIn but they all typically eventually move to WhatsApp and after weeks or even months of building intimacy these scammers will all introduce the same kind of proposal that they can help you make tons of money investing in cryptocurrency they are using psychological tips and tricks on you to make you a believe that you're becoming wealthy be that you

are in possession of special investment data that separates you from other people who don't know these secrets this kind of scam has a name Pig Butchery Pig butchering Pig butchering scams have reached a crisis level with victims often losing their life savings it's a name coined by the scammers themselves for the process of fattening up a victim with emotional intimacy before Slaughter basically taking all their assets and cutting them off on these fake investment sites victims see dashboards showing huge returns they see their money growing bigger and bigger and they believe that that growth is

thanks to the guidance of someone they now trust victims of this crime are seeing so much wealth accumulating and they're really believing it because they believe it they put more money in they then follow suggestions of the scammer to liquidate 401ks and to liquidate Children's College accounts but if they try to withdraw at all they're told that they need to deposit more money in taxes or fees and once they're unwilling or unable to deposit any more that's when they're cut off for Good by the time they get to me they have lost everything they have

because they literally put every penny into it I had nothing left no I definitely was not able to get it back I really felt like I trusted this person it's a devastating feeling a 2024 study estimated that since Pig butchering scams began they've stolen more than $75 billion globally and so this is happening in Mass this is happening this is the biggest threat that no body's talking about Aaron helps me understand how this scam worked but I still wanted to better understand who was doing the scamming so I asked her it's a convergence of crypto

and Co prior to covid Chinese organized crime was looking for a way to work in gambling they knew that gambling was illegal in China and that crypto was illegal in China and so they were looking for ways to run their gambling Empire ire and the right place for it was Cambodia so Chinese organized crime syndicates set up Casino fronts with big towers in the back that could be used as hotels or could be used as live work locations for online gambling when Co shut down the world those crime syndicates couldn't fill their casino hotels with

tourists so they repurposed them for an internet-based business instead Pig butchering it prayed upon kind-hearted victim who had time to talk during Co so it really was kind of a tsunami that worked in their favor but scamming at an industrial scale needed a Workforce so crime syndicates posted listings like this one for seemingly high-end jobs looking for educated bilingual applicants and the applications flooded in they would accept their free travel to Bangkok when they arrived in Bangkok their passports would be taken they'd be put in buses and bus to either Cambodia where these Casino Towers

were or Myanmar where there were compounds set up on the other side of the river from Thailand and from there they were forced to participate as the workforce for this new type of con in 2023 the office of the UN High Commissioner for human rights estimated that at least 120,000 people in Myanmar and 100,000 people in Cambodia may be held in situations where they are forced to carry out online scams we don't know a lot about what's really happening happening in there what we know is when there are survivors who are able to get out

by their families paying a ransom or they're able to escape we've heard some really vile horror stories about what's going on inside these compounds all of a sudden I was faced with the stakes of this story with the fact that the scammers that I'd been talking to over the phone could be victims themselves we have to be really delicate with people that we are trying to get information from who are still inside because their lives are at risk every single day there are real consequences for people we talk to on the inside and so we

need to just be really wary of any kind of danger that we put them in at this point I started to wonder what we were actually trying to do with this story these group chats in my WhatsApp could be created by Chinese organized crime conducting a crime with victims on both ends of the chat and if the lives of the people trying to scam me were in danger I didn't want to mess with them any more than necessary I decided that the best thing that we could do was to narrow down our question to just

one thing where were these scammers based if we could confirm somehow that the scammers in my phone were part of a Chinese criminal operation that felt like enough so I looked for organizations fighting Pig butchering scams and I found the global anti-cam organization which helps release trafficking victims across southeast Asia I reached out and I heard back from Troy ganau Troy started working as an investigator for the organization after he lost money in a crypto romance scam by the time was all said and done and they kept telling me to put more and more in

I had lost about $25,000 the whole romance side of it was uh you know it felt very real it felt very legitimate um I felt like anybody else did you know I felt like an idiot for falling for it like I get it everybody who thinks that if you fall for a scam you're dumb and stupid like yeah you're right I I felt that way um and when I realized that it was a scam that my money was gone um I mean I want to commit suicide now I only I only lost $25,000 maybe if

ID had more money maybe I would have lost more like thank God I didn't I realized I could not stay depressed and feeling you know all those feelings I couldn't stay in that place um I wanted to do something about it because I saw that we got a big problem here I asked Troy if there was any way we could learn anything about who was behind the group chats I was in there is a program that we use called grabify do link it allows you to take a legitimate URL and you can attach a grabify

link to it you could send that to them if they click on it and they don't have a VPN it may give you approximate location of where they are it was the most promising possible solution yet to figure out where these WhatsApp groups were based using grabify I made custom links for four scammers from four different WhatsApp groups when each scammer clicked their link it would take them to a real website but it would also take a snapshot of the settings on their computer like language IP address and most important of all location to get

them to click I'd have to use one of their own tricks against them social engineering using psychological tricks to get someone to make a security mistake I did that by acting like I was really really ready to send money but I just wasn't sure if I would be able to do it from a certain bank I started sending out the links first to one of the assistants and I waited they acknowledged the message but didn't click the link I sent it again still no click so I sent another grabify link to a different website but

still nothing maybe this wasn't going to work so next I sent a link to another assistant and I waited until they clicked suddenly I had this picture of the computer on the other end I could see their browser operating system internet service provider and IP address there was just one big problem their location showed up as New York grabify flag that they were likely using a VPN and there wasn't much other information to go off of so then I sent out another and they clicked this time there were even more details about the computer on

the other end they were likely using a vpn2 set to Elk Grove Village Illinois but there was one detail that told us something new zhcn the language code for simplified Chinese and even though the time zone was set to the eastern US that set was also written in Chinese finally I sent out one last link a few moments later they clicked and just like the one before them their language was set to simplify Chinese with eastern US time zone written in Chinese I reported all this back to Troy he believed that because the computer language

was set to simplifi Chinese it could be a Chinese Pig butchering scam and that all the people on the other end had just manually adjusted their time zones to match the eastern US it was not a perfect answer but it felt like the closest thing we were going to get to confirmation that these WhatsApp groups were part of this Global phenomenon operated by Chinese organized crime and I wanted to leave actually contacting trafficking victims to the professionals as part of his investigative work Troy has been in contact with a Chinese National doing scam work out

of a compound in Myanmar and the messages speak for themselves [Music] so what can we do about this for starters if you've been contacted by anybody on the internet who's now coaching you for investing in cryptocurrency you should know that it is likely a scam you can change your WhatsApp settings so that only contacts can add you to groups and you can leave and Report the groups that you are added to if you are a victim you can report what happened to law enforcement and file a report with the internet crime complaint center or ic3

if anyone is watching this you know and you are a victim of the scam reach out to law enforcement it doesn't matter if it happened last week or 3 years ago because I have some good news back in June of this year I received an email from the Secret Service saying that they have seized an account that my scam was tied to and long story short come this fall I might be getting a full recovery of my funds 3 years after it happened so I would encourage anyone they're a victim and they're watching this report

your losses it's also crucial for all of us to have empathy and patience for victims the stigma and embarrassment of feeling taken advantage of prevents a lot of people from coming forward one of the reasons why we don't know how big this problem is is because there are plenty of victims who are not willing to come forward we need to lead with empathy and and if you don't think this could happen to you okay all right but it's a fact that it's happening to tens of thousands of people and if you don't give them a

soft space to be able to disclose that this happened to them then we just keep putting this thing under the rug and we never know how big it is and we don't get help this crime exists at the intersection of technology and human nature exploiting our most basic desires for living a better life and for having social connection at a time when the internet makes those things feel easier than ever to miss out on the best thing that we can do is be cautious enough to look out for ourselves and patient enough to look out

for each other [Music]