Not all friends who you meet online are genuine

Anonymous | 22 Jun 2020

Internet Love Scam Investment Scam

1) - match zhenxi via tinder. She started the conversation but will soon divert the conversation to wechat, asking me to add her.

She will share that she’s someone who travels around often maintaining her trading business based in guangzhou shenzhen. She will come off as someone who is financially capable, emphasizing her knowledge in investing as a side business to maintain the high standard of livings there.

For the first few days, she would attempt to phish for personal information (location, salary, interest, investment knowledge, close relatives). Slowly, the conversation will progress to how she and her friend invest during their free time and earning fast bucks. Never in the conversation would she encourage you to join in investing, nor would she ask you to lend her money. 

When you ask for more info, she would offer her help for free to teach you how to invest. 

Next, she would direct you to this 'trading platform' (ccysu?.com), which shows a dashboard with various currency exchange and a crypto-coin. She asked to set up an account, and from there will send you another wechat account (trading platform support contact), asking you to seek advice from there for information of transfer of funds to the platform. 

The platform consultant will then send you a local account information of transfer of funds. Sometimes another account number will be given if the you mentioned the transferring amount is substantial. Platform consultant as sop will direct you a company's link and prove that they are a global customer. 

A smart move so that if anything happens, the blame would be on the platform, not the girl. 

3) personal info, money, time and effort all will be lost if one is to fall for this trap. I can only assume that you can 'trade' on the platform for the first couple of days or weeks since the scammer is only asking for a small amount of money to be invested initially. The platform is fake, so an easily manipulated bear chart will have you keep buying in for cost averaging down, unknowingly pumping in more money to the 'platform'.

To add, I believe is critical to continue the conversation even when realising that it is a scam. This way, counter scamming would enable us to phish more details from scammers and their operating sop. To that end of course never transfer any money or personal info to achieve it.

Scammer's details;

ZhenXi9203 (WeChat)/ ZhenXi (Tinder)/
Chenxi951126 (WeChat)/ 
(www.cnyi?.com)/  (www.ccysu?.com)

Bank Account Number: Standard Chartered Bank (??07909626) - Tan Mei Gi | OCBC Bank (??4-139398-001)SGD / (??4-146906-201)USD - Zeng Zhi Min