Tennessee Woman Loses $390,000 in Cryptocurrency Romance Scam

Zack Love
5 min readOct 18, 2022

One woman from Tennessee thought she was falling in love, bonding over a shared culture, and he gets her to invest $390K in cryptocurrency. The only problem is, it wasn’t real. She wasn’t really getting the incredible returns it showed on the bogus app. Her money was already gone.

Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash

A Tennessee woman loses her mother and wants to start a new life for herself in California. She and her father decided to sell her mother’s house and split the proceeds, but her new love interest has other things in mind for her inheritance money.

A Big Move After Tennessee Woman’s Mother Dies

CBS News reported that 24-year-old Nicole Hutchison wanted to start fresh with a move to California after her mother died. She and her father agreed to split the proceeds from selling her mother’s house. She was inheriting roughly $280,000 from the house sale, and this money was going to fund her new life until she fell for a man with a hidden agenda. (Source: CBS News)

Nicole Starts Dating Online, on Hinge, and Meets Hao

Nicole Hutchison; Credit: CBS News

It all started when Nicole meets a man on a dating website called Hinge.

The New York Times reported Nicole Hutchison was visiting a friend in California when she matched with a man named Hao that claimed to be working nearby in the clothing business.

They shared something in common: He shared he was from the same town in China where Nicole was adopted before she was brought to the U.S.

They continued to text over Whatsapp after she returned home to Tennessee. Hao started calling Nicole his sister, and she said he was her “long lost brother.” She got the impression he was shy after trying to video chat when he only partially showed his face and hung up the video call abruptly. (Source: The New York Times)

He shared with her that his interests were “swimming, fitness, trying different kinds of food, traveling to different countries, cooking” and “cryptocurrency.” Nicole didn’t know anything about…

Zack Love

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