The scam began with a message, then a friendly exchange. A stranger directed the victim to a cryptocurrency investment site that appeared professional — slick design, charts, even customer support. The first deposit showed a modest profit. So did the next. Encouraged, the victim sent more, even borrowing money to keep up. Then, without warning, the platform stopped responding. The account balance disappeared.
“That’s how they do it,” Jamie Lam, an investigative analyst with the US Secret Service, told law enforcement officials in Bermuda last month. “They’ll send you a photo of a really good-looking guy or girl. But it’s probably some old guy in Russia.”
Secret Service investigators traced the fraud to the domain name behind the fake investment site. Using open-source tools, they found out when it was registered, by whom and how it had been paid for. A cryptocurrency payment pointed them to another wallet. A brief VPN failure exposed an IP address.
Lam is part of the agency’s Global Investigative Operations Center or GIOC, a team specializing in digital financial crimes. Their tools are software, subpoenas, and spreadsheets, not badges or guns.
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