Crypto scammers are masquerading as lovers on dating apps like Hinge and conning victims out of their entire life savings

• Crypto scammers are feigning months-long romances on dating apps, NYT reported on Monday.
• Victims interviewed by the Times and The Sun lost $300,000 and $1.6 million in bogus crypto payments.

Gone are the days of easily debunked Nigerian prince email shakedowns. Now, cryptocurrency scammers are leveraging the age-old trickery of romance on dating apps like Hinge.

In a ploy known as "pig butchering," victims have reported losing entire inheritances and retirement funds following fake online engagements designed to win over their trust.

One 24-year-old woman from Tennessee lost $300,000 last year after a man she met on Hinge convinced her to invest in a phony crypto exchange site, The New York Times reported Monday. A 52-year-old man from Denver had $1.6 million stolen in a nearly identical scheme that also started on Hinge, The Sun reported last month.

"As romance scammers find new ways to defraud people simply looking for a meaningful connection, we continue to explore and invest in new updates and technologies to ensure we're keeping our daters as safe and protected as possible," a Hinge spokesperson told Insider in a statement.

Victims of romance scams like these have lost a total of $1.3 billion over the past five years, the highest of any fraud category, according to the Federal Trade Commission. In 2021 alone, reported losses hit a record-breaking $547 million, according to government data. That's nearly an 80% increase from 2020.

At the same time, the use of cryptocurrency in romance scams has exploded over the past three years. What starts out as casual investment advice from an online crush snowballed into a total of $139 million lost in bogus cryptocurrency payments last year.

"Many people who've experienced scams report being contacted on dating apps," a February FTC report said, adding that almost one-third of online romance scams reported last year began on Facebook or Instagram.

"The safety of all Hinge users is a top priority, and we take any incident of fraud very seriously. We have sophisticated machine learning technology in place and trained content moderators that are constantly patrolling for fraud. Users should never ever send money to someone they haven't met in person and if anyone on our app receives a request for money, we ask them to immediately report that individual so we can take action," a Hinge spokesperson said in a statement.