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A senior citizen in San Jose suspected something was up after the woman who supposedly helped him buy $170,000 worth of cryptocurrencies demanded double the amount to pay foreign taxes. .
He called the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, which led to detectives charging two Southern California residents with participating in a “pig butchering” scam, a scheme designed to defraud victims of their life savings. He was to be prosecuted.
The District Attorney’s Office announced Wednesday the arrests of Liu Hong, a 40-year-old man from Rosemead, and Yalin Li, a 23-year-old woman from El Monte. Authorities claim the two men are part of a large criminal organization operating out of the United States.
According to prosecutors, the scammers spent about three months convincing the 66-year-old man to invest in cryptocurrencies. Prosecutors said the man invested $170,000 but became suspicious after the scammers asked for $348,000 in foreign taxes related to the investment.
“This is the same tactic used by ‘pork shop’ scammers to trick victims into sending money,” said Assistant District Attorney James Gibbons Shapiro. “Pig Butchering shows how scammers slowly and methodically steal as much of their victims’ money as possible.
“They take everything from the tip of a person’s nose to the tip of their tail. That’s where the word came from.”
He said fraud costs Americans about $1 billion a year.
Prosecutors said the district attorney assigned the case to the office’s high-tech crime team, which convinced the scammers to collect the money in a bank parking lot in San Jose. The two suspects were arrested when they came looking for money.
Gibbons-Shapiro said arrests in such cases are rare because victims are often too embarrassed to report fraud to law enforcement. Or after the scammer has gotten what they want and cut off communication with the victim.
“What happened in this case is that the victim realized that they were being scammed while they were still in contact with the scammer,” he said. “And that has given law enforcement the ability to do their own tricks.”
Distance atty. Jeff Rosen said publicizing this case will make scammers stop and think, “Is my scam working or am I talking to the cops?” I am hopeful that this will be the case.
Gibbons-Shapiro said the San Jose incident began in May when a woman contacted the man through Facebook. The conversation, which often begins romantically in such scams, takes a turn when the woman mentions that her investment-savvy aunt Amelia is helping her make a lot of money. She then introduced the victim to her aunt and began tricking him into investing money.
Gibbons-Shapiro said scams often involve multiple people, many of them from Southeast Asia, and that human trafficking victims trap victims through text messages and fake financial websites. He said he was forced to fit in.
“Scams certainly occur overseas, but where do they occur? [have] We want to find our partners in the United States, prosecute them, and send them to prison,” he said. “And if possible, we want to identify and extradite people overseas.”
The Santa Clara Prosecutor’s Office says people who fear they may have been involved in a scam should understand that they are not alone and that some of the best people are victims of such crimes. said.
As part of the arrest and indictment announcement, prosecutors are releasing information for victims, which can be viewed on the district attorney’s website. Among other suggestions, prosecutors say victims should be wary of people trying to move conversations to encrypted instant messaging apps like Whatsapp or Signal.
According to the DA’s website, most law enforcement agencies are not familiar with pig butchering and may argue that it is a civil case, so they ask victims to contact financial crimes detectives or the FBI. We encourage you to report problems. They say victims can also seek help from the nonprofit group Advocating Against Romance Scammers.
Prosecutors said they were unable to recover the $170,000 a San Jose man lost in the scam, but they aim to bring some justice to the victims by indicting the two suspects.
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