The post An Indian civil contractor lost around $200,000 after falling for a romance crypto scam appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

An Indian man lost INR 1.67 crore, equivalent to around $200,000, after a woman scammed him through WhatsApp. The civil contractor named Ramesh connected with the scammer, who was posing as a potential bride, through a matrimonial website. The victim started having conversations with the scammer named Priyanka through WhatsApp beginning April 11.  Scammer claimed to work for a trading company The scammer claimed to be working in a cryptocurrency trading company based in Singapore. She convinced the victim to invest through the trading app and promised him high returns. The victim fell for the scam and started depositing large sums of money into the fake app. Initially, the victim transferred an investment of INR 50,000 (equivalent to $583) and made a profit of INR 8,300, which is around $100. When the victim saw that he was making profit, he continued transferring bigger amounts of money through bank transfers and UPI payments. The victim said, “After the first transfer, the app showed an instant profit of Rs 8,300. Lured by the returns, I continued to ‘invest’ more money into the platform through multiple bank transfers and UPI payments.” A Unified Payments Interface or UPI is a real-time payment system developed by India’s National Payments Corporation (NPCI) that lets people instantly transfer money between bank accounts via a mobile app. The victim made multiple deposits totaling INR 1.67 crore (equivalent to around $200,000) to the fake crypto investment app between April and June. However, when the victim tried to cash out his earnings, the fake app locked his wallet, preventing any withdrawal attempts.  The scammer then pressured the victim to transfer INR 25 lakh (equivalent to around $29,175) as an additional charge to release the funds. Ramesh refused to make any additional payments, and the victim blocked him on WhatsApp and…

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Filed under: News - @ July 9, 2025 8:25 pm