Robbed of My Lifesavings By a Crypto Scammer

Hello. I am here to help a good friend through a very difficult time in his life. His name is Cy Yuri (a pseudonym to protect his identity), and he is 52 years old. Cy is the victim of an online scam that robbed him of more than a million dollars—savings he had hoped to use to support his working-class family in the aftermath of his immigrant father’s death. The US Secret Service has told Cy he will never get his money back.

Please consider contributing to help Cy and his family rebuild their lives after their devastating loss. Gifts in any amount will help.

Cy is a victim of a highly sophisticated and cruel online scam called “pig butchering.” In this scam, a “friend”—someone from LinkedIn, a dating app, or even random text message—builds trust with the victim. Then they start giving investment advice. The victim is tricked into investing more and more money. (The “pig” is “fattened.”) The fake trading platforms look real. They deceive victims into thinking they are getting good returns on their investments. But then the scammer (or “butcherer”) suddenly disappears, taking all of the victim’s money with them. In 2021, worldwide losses from pig-butchering scams were in the billions. (Read more at Forbes.)

Disturbingly, “pig butchering” scams rely on human trafficking. The scammers are often young people from China, Taiwan, Thailand, and elsewhere lured to countries like Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar by the promise of high-paying jobs. Upon their arrival, they are forced into running scams for Chinese criminal syndicates that have set up cyberfraud operations. If they refuse, they face torture: beatings, food deprivation, electric shocks. (Read more at ProPublica.)

Victims of pig butchering in countries like the United States are often highly educated and digitally savvy—professional investors, graduate students, engineers. In the beginning, Cy was scammed into believing he was making gold transactions through MetaTrader, a widely used platform. In reality, the numbers he saw were fake; the scammers used a plug-in to manipulate the app.

Cy is not proud of what happened. He was tricked unknowingly. By the time he realized it was all a scam, it was too late. Cy was scammed while his father was in hospice and while his own mental health was fragile. He was emotionally vulnerable—an easy target. After he realized he had been scammed out of his life savings by someone he believed to be a friend, Cy was heartbroken. He started having suicidal thoughts. Desperate, he checked himself into a psychiatric ward. Today, as he takes small steps toward healing, he is committed to educating other people about cyberfraud to help them protect themselves against scams like pig butchering.

Please help Cy rebuild his life, help his family through this terrible time, and continue his cyberfraud advocacy work. Your contribution means so much. On behalf of Cy and his family: Thank you.

Learn more about Cy’s story and advocacy work:

“How One Man Lost $1 Million To A Crypto ‘Super Scam’ Called Pig Butchering,” Forbes, Sept. 9, 2022.

“Human Trafficking’s Newest Abuse: Forcing Victims Into Cyberscamming,” ProPublica, Sept. 13, 2022.

“Bay Area investor loses $1.2M in crypto scam as fraud cases triple across CA,” ABC7 News, July 27, 2022.

“Seduced by crypto and taken for millions Crypto

“The Human-Eat-Human Era?” Global Anti-Scam Org, May 10, 2022.