Solon Man Loses $500,000 in Cryptocurrency Scam Amid Rise in Similar Fraud Cases

The federal courthouse in Cleveland Credit: Tim Evanson/FlickrCC

By all accounts, it seemed to S.W. that Kristina Tian was a reliable investment partner to send money to last summer.

It was July 22, 2024, when Tian reached out via LinkedIn. She immediately touted her credentials: a degree from Stanford, a high position at Mucker Capital. You should invest with me, Tian told S.W. She even sent S.W. screenshots over WhatsApp of her booming investment portfolio.

S.W. seemed sold. In the following week, they wired $495,079 total, through eight separate transfers, into a cryptocurrency wallet.

Which all seemed legit to S.W.

“After the request was processed successfully and funds were returned to S.W.,” a court document filed in U.S. District Court on Wednesday reads, “S.W. was convinced that the investment platform was legitimate and continued with additional investments.”

A week later, on July 30, a call from the FBI’s Cleveland office confirmed it wasn’t: S.W. was mired in a cryptocurrency scam—often called “pig butchering” or a “pump and dump”—that could have, if the FBI didn’t intervene, bilked them out of $1.5 million of their savings. They were, after all, prepared to send even more money.

The Solon resident’s case is a part of what the FBI is calling an alarming rise in similar cryptocurrency scams, episodes of wire fraud and money laundering that dupe unsuspecting, would-be investors into exhanges that begin practically anywhere in the digital world—from LinkedIn to Coffee Meets Bagel to Facebook Messenger.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that, in 2024, tens of thousands of victims were scammed out of $5.8 billion in private assets, those that were “siphoned overseas,” the complaint reads, mostly to criminals in East Asia.

And the scams are creeping more and more close to home. In 2023, a woman in Mentor was duped out of $663,352 of her life savings after developing a relationship with a “friend” who began texting her out of the blue from “Seattle.” A complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in February laying out the similar situation.

The problem is, from the investigator’s point of view, that crypto wallets are, by design, tough to track down due to multiple levels of encryption on the blockchain.

And reports of fraud don’t usually make it to the federal level until people like S.W. have been “locked” out of investment accounts they once believed were totally legitimate.

By then, any money in the form of crypto that’s not frozen is already in the hands, and wallets, of the scammer thousands of miles away. With no hope, as S.W. found out after confronting “Kristina Tian” on WhatsApp, of getting their money back.

“I feel for you,” “Kristina” wrote to S.W. on WhatsApp. “You’re a good pig, just not fat enough.”

They added, “But thank you for giving me half you half of your savings.”

The Feds have frozen some but not all of the stolen assets in local cases.
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