‘Don’t You Remember Me?’
The Crypto Hell on the Other Side of a Spam Text
Article/Op-Ed in Bloomberg News
![](https://d1y8sb8igg2f8e.cloudfront.net/images/shutterstock_1890428014.width-800.jpg)
Aug. 17, 2023
Zeke Faux's book, Number Go Up, was excerpted in Bloomberg News.
I’d been hearing rumors about illicit uses of Tether—I’d seen court documents containing intercepted messages from a Russian money launderer promoting it to his clients, for one thing—but pig butchering was the most concrete example I found. People around the world really were losing huge sums of money to the con. A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer handed over $2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St. Louis was defrauded of $5 million. And the victims I spoke to all told me they’d been told to use Tether, the same coin Vicky suggested to me. Rich Sanders, the lead investigator at CipherBlade, a crypto-tracing firm, said that at least $10 billion had been lost to crypto romance scams.