Overview

Emotional scams have become very common these days. Scammers will pretend to have feelings for their victims in order to gain their trust and affection; they may even take advantage of their goodwill to lure them into investment scams.

This scam is often called a pig-killing scam in China because the pig (the victim) is eventually slaughtered by the butcher (the scammer) to defraud the money.

If any of the following scenarios sound familiar, there's a good chance you've fallen into a relationship scam.

Initial Contact: Online Platforms and Social Media

Dating apps and social media

Scammers have infiltrated dating apps, social media and messaging apps. They will pretend to be a young, beautiful Chinese man or woman and claim to want to meet like-minded, successful people.

Wrong phone number

We recently discovered a new scam where scammers are posing as beautiful girls. She mistakenly called the victim and falsely stated that she obtained your phone number through an online dating platform. This is a new scam in which scammers use "lovers" to convince victims.

Fake lover

The three purposes of the fake lover scam are:

(a) Identify wealthy and influential potential victims

(b) Build trust

(c) Mislead, distract, and influence the victims when necessary.

Conversations between scammers and victims always revolve around stock trading and various investments. He/she claims to have inside information about listed companies in order to successfully invest and profit.

If the victim is introduced to the "expert," the fake lover will often continue to maintain contact with the victim as an intermediary and encourage the victim to invest more money. When victims become suspicious, they immediately notify the scammer.

Reality Scam

Fraudsters are very savvy and their scams are very sophisticated, often masquerading as legitimate businesses. In some cases, their disguises are virtually indistinguishable from real companies.

Victims almost always conduct investigations, and scammers have already anticipated the other party's next move; they are good at using existing company information on the Internet to obscure victims' vision, or even evade investigation.

Fake brokerage firm

Scammers will typically set up a fake website claiming to be the official website of an existing legitimate brokerage or a local branch of a legitimate business. These fake websites are more sophisticated than the real ones and even gain some rankings on web engines.

Fake employees

This type of scam usually involves someone posing as an employee of a fake brokerage firm. Most of them contact the victims via email or instant messaging software, help the victims log into the fake platform, and guide the victims to transfer funds to external accounts. They usually provide help in the role of middleman to gain the trust of the other party.

Fake trading platform

MetaTrader 4 (MT4) and MetaTrader 5 (MT5) are developed by Metaquotes Software Corp. Scammers often allow victims to successfully log into fake trading platforms and trade on stolen MetaTrader 4 (MT4) and MetaTrader 5 (MT5). Victimized by scammers.

To give victims a false sense of confidence, scammers will conduct simulated trades and constantly update prices. They mislead their victims into thinking they are making profits on the trading platform. This prompts them to invest more money in an attempt to make the most of the "best time" to enter the market and earn the maximum profit. 

The picture above is a screenshot of a typical MT4 fraud website. If you see a website similar to the one above, beware.

Method

Scammers will always use different reasons to trick victims into depositing funds into one or more unknown third-party personal or company bank accounts. Early on, they often asked victims to invest small amounts of money to show that their platform was trustworthy. When the victim earns a certain amount of money, the scammer will ask the victim to invest more money.

Whenever a victim requests to withdraw profits from their fake account, the scammer will make up various excuses to ask the other party to invest the funds again. By the time the victim realizes they have been scammed, the conversation is over.