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He appeared to her on the app like a breath of fresh air.
A wine trader from France, he’d moved to West Philly just a few years ago, he said. He had a killer smile and an even better body — he clearly spent a lot of time at the gym. His name was Ancel Mali. And shortly after they moved the conversation to WhatsApp, he deleted his Hinge profile. He said he wanted to focus on her.
So refreshing, Shreya Datta thought.
It was January and for months, Datta, a 37-year-old director at a multinational tech company in the Philly suburbs, had been on the apps. Every guy she met was talking to several women. She liked that Mali was so sure about her.
Later, she would see that as a red flag — along so many others. She would wonder how she could have been so fooled. “It’s like my psychology was hacked,” she’d say.
By then, she had lost $450,000.
Datta was a victim of a scam known as “pig butchering,” a loose translation of the Chinese name for the scheme, which is thought to have originated there. Con artists posing as someone else develop a relationship with victims and eventually convince them to invest more and more money in a fake cryptocurrency investment platform.
The relationship might begin on a dating app, like Datta’s did, or on LinkedIn, or as a WhatsApp message seemingly meant for someone else. As the relationship progresses, the scammer drops that they’ve been making huge sums of money trading cryptocurrency, and eventually encourages the victim to try it, walking them through each step on a fake investment app.
The con is a long and sophisticated one, with the scammer engaging in a months-long courtship to build trust and sometimes allowing the mark to initially withdraw their profits from the app. But after the victim invests heavily, they’ll find they’re no longer able to pull their money out. The app will ask for an income tax — one last bid to get the victim to pay before they realize they’ve been scammed.
Cryptocurrency investment fraud is the fastest growing kind of investment fraud, according to the FBI’s Internet Crimes Complaint Center (IC3), with victims reporting losses of $2.57 billion last year, nearly tripling from 2021. Last year, more than 800 people in Pennsylvania reported being victimized by cryptocurrency scams, losing a total of nearly $55 million, the IC3 reported.
“I guess I’m a ‘pig,’” Datta said with a laugh in an interview last month, a few weeks after she realized she had been scammed. Datta, an Old City resident who’d moved to the States from India for her master’s in 2008, was struggling to recover. She was making arrangements to move into a cheaper apartment and sell her car, while also fighting off intense shame and self-loathing. But she was also still able to make light of the situation, relishing in a seafood pastry from Paris Baguette and joking that she wanted to stress-eat everything in the Chinatown cafe.
She was trying to focus on the ways in which she was fortunate: She still had a high-paying job, her family was able to bail her out of debt, she would eventually dig herself out of this mess.
“Sometimes I’m like, ‘It’s just money,’” she said. “Some days I’m like, ‘I should just cry.’”
As soon as she and Mali moved to WhatsApp, they started chatting morning and night.
That first week, he shared his dream of achieving “wealth freedom.”
“So that I don’t have to work all my life, and I can have more time to accompany my lover to travel around the world, leaving footprints of our love in every corner of the world,” he wrote.
He added that one of his hobbies was monitoring the crypto market.
Datta, who describes herself as a romantic with terrible luck, was just getting over a divorce and finally felt open to dating again. The more she spoke to Mali, the more she grew taken by the prospect of retiring early and traveling the world with a handsome, French, wine-trading gym buff.
“Finally,” she thought, “something nice is happening.” She noticed his written English was a bit off but chalked it up to it not being his first language.
They made plans to meet when she returned from a family visit to Pune, India. In the meantime, he convinced her to give crypto trading a shot. He would teach her his ways. He texted, “You can use the money you earn to treat me to dinner.”
She downloaded what appeared to be SoFi’s crypto trading app through a link he sent her — it had two-factor authentication and customer service, which she would come to regularly communicate with. She converted $1,000 of her savings into cryptocurrency on Coinbase, a crypto exchange, and from there, sent it to the trading app.
Datta and Mali sent screenshots back and forth, with Mali showing her exactly what to do. She watched as within minutes her $1,000 turned into $1,250. And she had no problem withdrawing the whole balance from the app.
In late January, Mali said he couldn’t meet because he had a business trip to San Francisco. By then, she had turned a $6,000 investment into $9,000. Between messages about crypto, they talked about the vegan meals she was cooking, sent selfies and flirty emojis, and cooed over photos she sent from the cat shelter where she volunteered.
He often checked on her (“Have you eaten yet darling?”) and when she thanked him for helping her invest, he responded, “I said I would protect you.” It was exactly the kind of care Datta dreamt of.
Mali’s time in California dragged on. He said his uncle was sick with terminal cancer; he had to care for him. They video chatted twice very briefly — Mali said he was shy, the camera didn’t linger on his face — and he showed her his dog. Datta thought she heard his French accent.
To make real money, he told her, they’d need to up their investment. He loaned her $150,000 and urged her to invest more of her money, to sell her stocks and take out personal loans. She listened. He grew irate when she struggled to tap into her 401K, facing questions at work about why she wanted to do so.
“Can’t you control your own money?” he said.
“Please talk to me nicely,” she wrote back.
On Valentine’s Day, he sent her a bouquet from Bee Flowers, a shop in Port Richmond. The next day, she successfully liquidated her 401K.
“I was in a trance,” she said. “I felt like I had met my person.”
By the end of March, Datta’s $450,000 investment in the fake app had more than doubled. But when she went to withdraw it, she received a message that she had to first pay a 10% personal income tax.
With a sinking feeling, she called her brother, a lawyer in London.
The photos Mali had sent her, her brother discovered with the help of a private investigator, were not of a French wine trader but of a German fitness influencer who knew his way around a mirror selfie. Datta began to see everything in a painful new light: Mali’s never-ending trip to San Francisco, all his excuses about not being able to meet up, and the strange references to China, like that time he said she should be a “Chinese wife.”
Pig-butchering scams are run by criminal syndicates out of centers in Cambodia and staffed by thousands who are lured to another country by the promise of a legitimate job, according to reports last year in Vice News and the South China Morning Post. These workers — who are enslaved and abused — are given sophisticated scripts tailored to different kinds of victims and forced to use them on targets like Datta. A volunteer with the Chinese-Cambodia Charity Team, which rescues people forced into scam labor, estimated to Vice that it had saved 50 people from centers in Cambodia over several months in 2021 and 2022, and most of them were from mainland China.
The first week of April, Datta filed reports with the police and the FBI. She hasn’t received substantive updates from either. A few days later, Coinbase froze her account, writing in an email: “We are concerned you may have sent cryptocurrency to a fraudulent investment platform.” Coinbase did not respond to a reporter’s request for comment.
Last month, the Department of Justice announced it had recovered $112 million worth of virtual currency linked to pig-butchering scams.
Since her fantasy shattered, Datta has started psychotherapy and joined a support group for victims of cyber romance scams.
She’s reflected on why she was the perfect victim.
As a single woman approaching middle age in a culture that privileges coupledom, “I felt like I had a hole in my soul from not having a man in my life.” And as an immigrant without deep roots and relationships in the city, she was used to doing everything on her own.
She made a six-figure salary but never paid much attention to her money; investing with Mali made her feel like she was “taking empowered action.” And her standards for men were low, making her fall for all Mali’s seemingly caring attention.
In the aftermath of the scam, she’s had to deal with the judgment of others who scoff, I’d never fall for that. Still, she wants to combat the shame she’s felt and hopes that sharing her story will prevent others from falling for the same con.
“My goal is to not hide,” she said.
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