He was writing from hell, 8,000 miles away. A summer shower had left a rainbow over my Brooklyn neighborhood, and my two children were playing in a kiddie pool on the roof of our apartment building. Now the sun was setting, while I-in typical 21st-century parenting fashion, forgive me-compulsively scrolled through every app on my phone. The message had no subject line and came from an address on the encrypted email service Proton Mail: "vaultwhistle@proton.me." I opened it.
Even now, face to face with his decimated savings, it's hard to reconcile the five-month relationship he had with a Finnish woman in Florida with the elaborate scam it now clearly was. It felt different than a typical con too personal, too involved, too reciprocal. But really, what's known as pig butchering schemes where scammers build relationships and trust with victims before tricking them into sham cryptocurrency investments have become particularly pervasive, with some operations tied to mass scam centers based abroad.
When black markets for drugs, guns, and all manner of contraband first sprang up on the dark web more than a decade ago, it seemed that cryptocurrency and the technical sophistication of the anonymity software Tor were the keys to carrying out billions of dollars worth of untouchable, illicit transactions online. Now, all of that looks a bit passé. In 2025, all it takes to get away with tens of billions of dollars in black-market crypto deals is a messaging platform willing to host scammers and human traffickers, enough persistence to relaunch channels and accounts on that service when they're occasionally banned, and fluency in Chinese.
