I Lost the Majority of My Life Savings

I have a daily practice where I write things down that I am grateful for, I am proud of, and then I set intentions for the day.

In looking back at a few of those entries just before I found out the news that I had lost a majority of my life savings in an online dating scam, it hurts.

It’s a quality of pain that is unique in my life. I have suffered significant losses, from my dad dying when I was 26 (and he was 60), to my marriage ending shortly after moving to a new country, to my entire way of making a living as a Thai Yoga Massage teacher being shut down by the pandemic.

One of the unique aspects of this current hurt is how in hindsight, it all seemed so preventable. As a result, these last few weeks have taught me that it is mighty easy to hate myself as I navigate this new reality.

I believe a gratitude practice is a vital thing to do, to know just how supported I am, how much abundance, love, prosperity, opportunity and kindness already exists in my life. It is a doorway and a buffer as I live my life the best way I know how.

But I haven’t been writing my gratitudes lately. It hurts. At first it hurt intensely, and these days, it’s more of a dull pain that resides in the backdrop of my daily life.

What I’ve come to realize is that now, more than ever, is the best time to write them down. The fact that I’m not is an important lesson that I am in need of kindness. Self-kindness, self-love.  

To question my judgement is one thing, to question my worthiness and if I will ever feel whole and restored is something else. This pain is of the latter variety and that is a huge reason why I am here, writing and sharing my story.

In truth, I feel compelled to write and share my experience for a multitude of reasons.

Number one, let this be a way to help prevent this from happening to someone else. Let more of us know that in the world of online dating, predators are in those waters, looking to build trust with people so they can take them for their money. And they are very good at what they do.

Number two, if something similar has happened to you, where you got involved with someone, trusted that person and then you got burned, you should know you are not alone.

Creating community around this process is important. Let us help each other, let us know we are not alone, let us create a safe space to heal and feel and lift each other up.

And that’s because of number three. I refuse to let this break my spirit.

Thus, one reason I want to share my story is to offer support -and learn from- people who are looking for ways to stay open. That even when things happen in your life that leave you feeling where that is close to impossible, you know in your heart that building even more ways to cultivate trust and love is the way to go.

Let that which hurts and confuses and which first creates doubt and worry, become something that strengthens, opens us up, and acts as a source of positivity and growth. Let the channels be established for release to happen and let’s make choices every day that help to facilitate that release. Let the lessons learned be of use to others on their own healing and growing journey.  

For all this to happen, let’s start at the beginning.

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The Beginning

It started innocently enough. With a like and a hello. Sandy was a 35-years-old, Harvard educated, successful self-made businesswoman, or so I thought. She presented herself through her pictures as worldly, loving to travel, just as comfortable in high fashion as a big comfy sweatshirt.

It was the picture in the sweatshirt that was most appealing to me and made me think we’d get along.

As a result, I hit that like button in the Facebook dating app.

It was during the Christmas holidays and it was a time of great renewal. What appealed to me about online dating was that it was giving me a chance to extend myself. It was helping me to meet people from different backgrounds that I would not otherwise meet in my everyday life.

I was working with it to help extend my comfort zone, to help get to know myself and open myself up to meeting and matching with someone beyond what I had known previously.

Sandy’s preferred way to get to know someone was through writing. As she put it, this was how she gets to know a person’s soul.

As a writer and as someone who had spent most of Covid in a loving long-distance relationship, I was intrigued. That two-year relationship had also included a fair bit of texting at the onset as we got to know each other, so I decided to play along.

Sandy is Chinese, and I was taken by many of the colorful ways she expressed herself.

Chinese kanji is an image-based language, and there were many times in our texts where you felt that quality of communication breaking through the constructs of an English language that by comparison can feel cold and calculating.

It was exciting to take in those images, those descriptions, that playful banter of the language in a way that I hadn’t really felt before. 

At the same time, when I would ask if we could also talk, she repeated the line about this method being the way she prefers to get to know someone’s soul. For now, this is how she wanted to communicate.

She promised that eventually we would talk and meet. As timing would have it, she was going to be back in the Bay Area in February, at which time we could meet.

Her job was in real estate, a leader of a team of investors and partners that built and rented out apartments in San Francisco. She was spending her holidays and start of the year in LA where she was also helping her cousin manage short term rental properties.

She had an assistant, who was also her driver as she did not like to drive.

These were the quirks and the perks of someone who was this financially successful.

She shared pictures with me when she was at lunch with her assistant, picking out furniture to help decorate those apartments, at a fancy gala with her family and friends, and just her.

By then, I was hooked. The trust had been built through our text conversations and the images and audio messages that we had sent back and forth to each other.

Relatively early on in the conversation as part of the banter, it was I who had first asked her if maybe at some point she could give me some investing advice.

She operated at a financial level that was so far beyond my own and she had shared a picture of her with her mentor, a billionaire investor.

But 2022 had been a good year, and I had actually managed to rebuild some savings after two and a half years of scraping through the pandemic. I had decided well before meeting her, that I needed to learn how to manage and invest that money.

I had purchased a course a couple of months earlier with the intention to learn exactly that. It included safe, prudent investment strategies and setting up a system to put it all on auto-pilot. I had begun looking at the course, but then the rush that came with my end of year activities put it on the back burner. The down time during the holidays was going to be an opportunity to pick it back up.

It was with that in mind that I made the casual mention that maybe she could help me some day to invest, just as she had taken a great interest in the massage that I teach.

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So it Begins…

A few days passed between my casual mentioning how I’d be interested in getting some investment advice from Sandy, and her actually following up on that.

We had been talking daily, but eventually she pivoted and let me in on a short-term investment trade opportunity she was engaged in.

That delay was essential in helping to build that trust. And even when the investing started in earnest, it occupied just a fraction of our time. Most of our conversation was about us, our lives, our dreams, our interests.

When the investing side of things began, I was very curious to see what she could teach me. At the same time, it so happened that I had some bitcoin in a crypto exchange account that I had opened when the market was high. It had lost a lot of its value, so I was just keeping it there as a long-term play, waiting for the time when the market might start to go back up.

The money that was in that account was earmarked for investing.

The way she explained it to me, the market conditions were creating a perfect opportunity to capitalize on short-term investing opportunities in crypto.

In order to do so, I would need to open a new account on a different exchange and she would help me to do that.

We would be using the technology offered on this other exchange to either sell short or buy long. The investments we’d be making were literally for 120 seconds at a time.

When I told her what my balance was in that crypto account, she expressed that we play it safe. She did not want me to lose money. She suggested we take half of it into this new exchange.

That is what I did.

On her end, using her knowledge of the market and having a computer that was processing crypto nodes, she would share with me the exact kind of trading we would do, with the exact right amounts to invest. Time was of the essence, so when she shared the amounts, all I needed to do was invest.

It was, without a doubt, intoxicating.

On that first night, my $3400 investment had grown to $4200. In less than an hour I had made $800.

Not only had I never made money like this so quickly, it had been such an arduous and long struggle to have any decent savings at all.

After so many years of grinding and hard work to save bit by bit, here was an opportunity to grow something substantial relatively quickly.

My thoughts were swept up in how I could use this money to help pay for college for my daughter, to hire someone to help grow my business, to help take care of my ailing mother.

At the same time, I did have some serious doubts on how this could all be true. There was a significant part of me that said to proceed with caution.

I researched as best as I could. I looked up short term trading and this style of crypto trading which was totally new to me.

Best I could tell it was legit.

I did a test to make sure I could withdraw some money from the account. In fact, she had encouraged me to do so, telling me to take some out and celebrate my earnings with my daughter.

I had no issues doing so and once I had done all of that, it helped to reassure me that this was in fact real. It felt like an incredible gift from someone I was developing true feelings for.

As she explained it to me, her helping me was fulfilling a dream of hers to teach what she knew to someone. It also meant a lot to her to know what I was planning on doing with the profits.  

From there, my next challenge was working on myself and summing up the courage to invest more.

I meditated on it, I carried the thoughts through my day as I worked and as I did my healthy practices, such as exercise and yoga. I asked for clarity on what to do and it felt clear. I would continue and I would increase the investment.

Every time she guided me to do an investment, I was making a 10% return with every trade. It was amazing.

I took the rest of the money I had in that first crypto account to begin with and then I continued from there.

I was hesitant and this is when she would explain that increasing the investment would not only help me to earn more in this limited time with the markets behaving as they are, they would help to make the investment more secure.

She assured me that she was only interested in my safe investments. I believed her and within three weeks, I thought I had made $35,000. It was truly life changing money and I was blown away.

Not only had I met this wonderful person that I was developing deep feelings for, her kindness and willingness to share her knowledge and success felt like a true gift.

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The Bottom Falls Out- Lessons learned the Hard Way

The first time I actually told someone about my good fortune was when I had made about $25K. I was two weeks into this experience. And of course, that would be one of the first flags that I did not pay attention to.

Why did I wait to tell anyone about what was going on?

Was it because I had my doubts and I didn’t want to be talked out of it? Possibly.

It seemed too good to be true? Certainly

I just wasn’t ready to talk about it. Clearly

I felt the need to navigate those doubts on my own in order to test and stretch my own limits of how to push myself. That is the story I was telling myself. 

When I told my friend about it, he was as blown away as I was by what was happening. The greatest dating story ever!

It took a week before I told the next people. I was teaching a full weekend Thai Yoga Massage training in San Francisco, and had made arrangements to stay at a couples’ house in the city on Saturday night.

Spending time with these friends was one of the great perks of teaching this workshop. Having this sleep over with my oldest friends in the US was like a homecoming.

I had mentioned to the husband early in the night that I had a wild dating story to share and he then mentioned it to his wife. But we waited until the kids were in bed so I could get into the details.

They were both really happy for me and they both had their doubts. It was the wife though who really took the lead in sniffing it out. It took a few minutes of Googling and sure enough there it was, described in too much heart-breaking detail.

The scam that I was living and they even have the most horrible name for it, “the pig-butchering scam”.

The shock was intense. I knew sleep would be hard to come by on this night.

The first thing I did was try to make a significant withdrawal from the crypto account that now held not only my profits, but a majority of my savings.

By now it was becoming clear what the scam was. I thought I had deposited money into my own crypto account and had been making these terrific profits from these trades.

Instead, I had deposited my money into someone else’s crypto account that I had no control over and the trading was a façade.  

The way it became abundantly clear was when I contacted the support team at the crypto exchange that was holding my funds. First I was told to be patient and allow 24 hours for the funds to transfer.

A couple days later, I was told that my account had been flagged for a possible security breach, so I would need to deposit an additional $10,000 into the account as a security deposit and then the funds would be released.

I tried to play it cool with Sandy in such a way to see if she could help me get my money out, even though I was more than 99.9% sure she was part of this scam.

What other choice did I have other than try to play it out? I asked her if she could lend me the $10,000 needed to release the funds and I would then pay her back as soon as I had my money. She said she would love to, but her money was now tied up in stocks and investments. There would be penalties to withdraw the funds and I had a short time limit to pay the deposit or risk my account being frozen. She explained that there was no way she could have the funds in time.

Our conversations ended shortly afterwards, and naturally so did my savings.

What I’ve been left with is a cautionary tale. The one I am sharing with you now

There are some vital lessons to be learned here that I think are the biggest takeaways so you can protect yourself:

1)     Schemes to take your money are all too real in the world of online dating. And that is especially true on free dating sites like Facebook.

2)     Avoid getting to know someone who claims to be local, but is only interested in talking through online apps.

3)     There is no replacement for face-to-face meetings or long conversations. If you’re too busy or they are too busy, then be patient.

4)     Don’t mix money and romance

5)     Talk to people you trust if something seems too good to be true

6)     If you feel hesitant to talk to people you’re close to about what’s going on, then that is a red flag. In most cases it only makes sense that you’d want to share really good news -or bad news- with those trusted people.

What to do if this happens to you:

1. If you are in the US, the place to report it is the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center

2. The Global Anti-Scam Org offers free resources and support to help you try and get your money back. It’s available to anyone. They caution you that after the first 48-72 hours, it is quite likely your money has already been moved out of the account. So best to act quickly.

If you are into online dating, or if you know people who are into online dating, I hope you’ll share this story. The more we know, the more we can prevent this from happening.

But now that it has happened to me, it is no longer a story I heard through the grapevine. Instead, it is an integral part of my life story.

As a result, my life has taken such an unexpected turn from where I thought I was as the clock struck midnight on 2022.

And the story of what’s happened since losing that money is the next part of the tale I want to share.

It’s the part that I hope can be of service to you when you’re going through something hard.

So hard that you’re not sure when you’ll get another good night’s sleep. So hard that you could be left wondering when’s the next time you can look into your child’s eyes without thinking that you’ve let them down. So hard that you’re so full of shame, doubt and worry that you’re wondering what the hell you’re going to do next.

If you would like to help on this rebuilding journey…

Support can come in many ways and I am grateful, honored and humbled by it all. Some of those ways include:

• Like this article and drop a line in the comments. If you have questions, I will do my best to answer them

• Subscribe to this newsletter and consider becoming a paid subscriber

• Sharing this story

• Offering love and support to yourself and people in your life whenver possible. Let the love flow!