Bitcoin Adviser Reveals Client’s Retirement Funds Lost in Romance Scam—Here’s How It Happened

A financial adviser specializing in Bitcoin has pulled back the curtain on a devastating scam that wiped out a client's entire retirement nest egg.

The Heartbreak Portfolio

Forget market volatility—the latest threat to crypto investors isn't a flash crash, but a flash of affection. This case reveals how sophisticated romance scams are now targeting digital asset holders, leveraging emotional manipulation instead of technical exploits.

The Con Artist's Playbook

The scam followed a familiar, painful pattern: build trust, fabricate a crisis, and request "urgent" financial help. The twist? The entire narrative was engineered to funnel funds into irreversible cryptocurrency transactions. Once the Bitcoin left the wallet, the digital trail went cold—and so did the relationship.

Self-Custody's Double-Edged Sword

This incident highlights the brutal paradox of decentralization. The very feature that protects assets from institutional overreach—the lack of a central authority to reverse transactions—also leaves victims with zero recourse. It's the ultimate test of the "not your keys, not your coins" mantra, with a cruel corollary: "lose your keys to a scammer, lose your coins forever."

A Costly Lesson in OpSec

Financial advisers in the crypto space are now sounding the alarm, stressing that security extends far beyond seed phrase storage. The human element remains the weakest link—a vulnerability no hardware wallet can patch. It turns out the most important private key to protect might just be your own heart.

As one industry observer dryly noted, this adds a new, grim category to retirement planning: the romance scam 401(k) liquidation event. Because nothing says "happily ever after" like watching your life savings vanish into a blockchain abyss, all for the promise of love that never existed.

Bitcoin Adviser Says Client Ignored Warnings, Lost Funds to Scam

In a post shared on X, Michael said he made “numerous phone calls” and sent a “string of text messages” in an effort to stop the transfer.

The warnings went unheeded. While Michael was out to dinner, he received a message from the client confirming that the funds were gone.

“My client was falling for a pig butchering scam,” Michael wrote. “And as of last night … I received a devastating text message from him saying he had lost it all.”

Unlike traditional cyberattacks that rely on malware or direct wallet compromises, pig butchering scams depend on emotional manipulation.

I have a Bitcoin client
who just lost all his Bitcoin.

He isn't wealthy.
He finally made it to 1 BTC.
I celebrated with him over the phone.

But within days of him finally leaving Coinbase to setup a distributed multi-key security and inheritance protocol, he was approached by… pic.twitter.com/H1FK6Mbbyi

Victims are convinced to willingly send their assets, often after being groomed through days or weeks of conversation that blend investment advice with personal and romantic claims.

Michael said the client, who had recently divorced, went beyond sending Bitcoin. He also purchased a plane ticket for the scammer, expecting to meet her in person.

After the transfer was completed, the attacker reportedly admitted that the photos used throughout the relationship were fake and generated using artificial intelligence tools.

The case highlights the growing scale of pig butchering scams across the crypto industry. In 2024 alone, these schemes drained an estimated $5.5 billion from victims across roughly 200,000 reported cases, according to industry data.

In June, the US Department of Justice announced the seizure of more than $225 million in cryptocurrency tied to pig butchering operations, underscoring the growing enforcement response to one of crypto’s most damaging fraud trends.

AI-Driven Crypto Scams Hit $4.6B as Deepfakes Fuel New Fraud Wave

As reported, the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence is driving a new generation of crypto scams, pushing global losses to $4.6 billion in 2024, according to a 2025 Anti-Scam Research Report released on June 10.

The study, co-authored by Bitget, SlowMist, and Elliptic, found that scammers are increasingly using AI-generated deepfakes, fake video calls, and Trojan-infected job offers to deceive victims, with at least 87 AI-powered scam rings dismantled in the first quarter of 2025 alone.

The report warns that deepfake impersonations, social engineering, and Ponzi schemes disguised as DeFi or NFT projects now dominate the threat landscape.

Criminal groups are also using cross-chain bridges and obfuscation tools to launder stolen funds, complicating recovery efforts.