New Delhi: A single company operating in Myanmar has cheated people out of more than $100 million in less than two years, a report has revealed.
Researchers from blockchain analytics company Chainalysis had tracked digital coins issued by Tether, one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world, used in “pig butchering” scams, in which false romantic relationships are engineered in order to gain trust from victims.
They noted that Tether tokens had been used to make payments to a company situated in KK Park in eastern Myanmar from the families of trafficking workers who had been forced to pay ransoms in exchange for their release.
“Some scam operations may be mixing proceeds from scams with ransom payments from victim families,” said Eric Heintz, global analyst at International Justice Mission, US.
The report found that the single Chinese company was able to transfer more than $100 million in cryptocurrencies into just two digital wallets.
According to the report, KK Park is one of the biggest most known romantic scam compounds operating today. It is said to have over 2,000 trafficked romance scam workers.
The FBI’s 2022 IC3 Report stated that in 2022, US citizens reported losses of more than $700 million to romance scams in both cryptocurrency and fiat and nearly $2.5 billion to crypto investment scams of any kind, regardless of whether there was a romance element or not.
–IANS