A tech executive thought she had met her dream man on Hinge but she ended up losing her $450,000 in a terrifying scam known as 'pig butchering'.
Shreya Datta, 37, lost all her savings after falling for someone she thought was a handsome French wine trader called Ancel Mali.
The scam is cruelly known as 'pig butchering' because victims are 'fattened up' with the fake promise of a romantic relationship before being 'butchered' by being fooled into parting with their money.
Ms Datta, who is a self-described romantic with bad luck when it comes to partners told the Philadelphia Inquirer she was lured in by Ancel's seeming devotion to her.
The two first met on Hinge before quickly moving the conversation on to Whatsapp.
From early on Ancel brought up that he wanted to earn enough to travel the world and mentioned trading in cryptocurrency as the way to do it.
Ms Datta, who lives in Old City, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and earns a six-figure salary in an international company, said she felt she had "'a hole in my soul for not having a man in my life" before meeting Ancel.
She added: "It’s like my psychology was hacked."
He told her: "'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."
Ms Datta was hooked and under his gentle insistence she downloaded a cryptocurrency app and started making money.
What makes the scam so alluring is that the victim begins investing money and seeing returns on that. She converted $1,000 of her savings into digital currency through the exchange platform Coinbase.
Her $1,000 became $1,250, which she was able to withdraw.
The relationship between the victim and Ancel continued to develop but he always came up with excuses why they couldn't meet.
As the scam progressed she invested $6,000 which had grown to $9,000.
But he urged her to continue investing, to sell her stocks and even dig into her 401k.
When she struggled to access the money he snapped: "Why can't you control your own money?"
Eventually she accessed $450,000 of the money meant for retirement and invested it into the fake app, which later claimed her money had more than doubled.
But when she attempted to withdraw it she got a message she needed to spend even more - a 10 per cent personal income tax.
It was then she realised she may have been scammed. She called her brother who hired a private investigator who discovered the account was fraudulent.
She reported it to the authorities and even the FBI but she has yet to get her money back.
Ms Datta said: "Sometimes I’m like, 'It’s just money.' Some days I’m like, ‘I should just cry.’"
Many of these operations are run by criminal groups in South-East Asia which employ thousands of people.
A report by Vice News and the South China Morning Post found last year workers themselves can be enslaved and abused after being pressed into the work with the promise of a legitimate job.
The scam can take months to complete as the scammer needs to build trust.
