Tinder swindler: UAE resident looking for second wife loses savings to crypto scam

If your online romance looks too good to be true, it probably is. Who would know this better than dad-of-five Sajjad Khan, who has been duped out of his life savings by a woman he met on a popular dating app, but never in real life.

Lured into a bogus crypto currency investment scheme by his potential second wife, the unsuspecting Ajman-based Pakistani safety trainer lost $47,000 in a matter of days. He had saved the money over several years to make a down payment against a house.

“I am heartbroken and financially devastated,” said the 40-year-old who met the scammer on Tinder early this year.

“She introduced herself as Anna. She said she was from Korea but lived in China. Soon we started talking and struck a rapport,” Sajjad told Khaleej Times.

“There was nothing common between us, but she was friendly and chatty. She called me ‘Honey’ , I called her ‘Princess’. I was looking for a life partner. In Anna, I saw the perfect wife. She said she wanted to open a yoga studio. I was impressed,” he said.

Within days of their whirlwind online romance, the woman sweet-talked Sajjad into investing into a crypto currency called BIS.

"She claimed the investment would transform my life."

Broken heart, empty wallet

Sadly, for Sajjad, that wasn’t the case. If losing money and being blocked by his love-match weren’t bad enough, he’s now being chided by two of his friends who also invested in BIS at his behest.

The friends -- Mohsin Ali and A.K. -- pegged their losses at $11,000 and $3,000 each.

“What is gone is gone. We were greedy and stupid, but we don’t want others to be in the same situation as us,” said Ali, who works as an operations manager at a private firm in the UAE.

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“We have come forward with our stories so that people could learn from our mistakes and avoid such scams,” he said.

New hunting ground

Of late, dating apps have become the new hunting ground of internet predators, with romance scams raking in millions of dollars annually.

Experts reckon at least one in every ten online dating profiles is fake.

As is typical with such scams, Sajjad’s online courtship was largely via WhatsApp text messages. And yet, the relationship felt real to him.

Sajjad said he never suspected anything was amiss when the woman asked him to move their conversations to WhatsApp and then persuaded him to invest in BIS.

Lest there be any doubt, the fraudster sent Sajjad a 68-page white-paper on the crypto currency, detailing among many things, its “trustworthy mechanism”.

“She said BIS was tipped to rise to $500. We were excited,” said Sajjad.

Like countless other victims, he was then told to test the waters by opening an account with Binance and then transferring $1,000 from it to a dodgy crypto trading platform called FidelityEx.

For the uninitiated, Binance is an online crypto currency exchange where investors can buy digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Shortly after Sajjad made the initial investment, the woman walked him through the process of withdrawing profits – in this case $207 into his current bank account.

Once she had gained Sajjad’s trust, she encouraged him to invest more money for better returns.

Before long, Sajjad and his friends had moved over Dh230,000 from their bank accounts to the crypto exchange and then transferred the money to FidelityEx, just as they had been taught by the woman.

Appearances are deceptive

Their accounts appeared to show them making money but when they tried to withdraw the profits from FidelityEx, the website wouldn’t let them do that.

Sajjad tried to reach out to Anna but she refused to respond. Instead, she deleted her Whatsapp account and blocked Sajjad on another number. “It was hard to believe that the woman who would exchange love notes with me daily would shun me overnight. First, she stole my heart, then she stole my money,” rued Sajjad.

The panicked victims looked up the website of FidelityEx for a customer support number. There was none. “All it had was an email address. We shot off several emails. All of them bounced,” he said.

Alert warning

As it turned out, FidelityEx is a fake platform that piggybacked on the credibility of Fidelity Investments Inc, commonly referred to as Fidelity - an American multinational financial services corporation based in Boston, Massachusetts. USA.

Last year, Canadian security regulator, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) issued an investor alert warning about scams using fraudulent documents that “contained Fidelity’s logo, brand or likeness.

“Fidelity is actively monitoring the situation and taking all necessary steps to protect our clients and the community at large,” CSA said in a statement.

FidelityEx’s website now ceases to exist.