“I’m a captain in the U.S. Army serving in Syria. I need you to hold $5.7 million of my money until I get to the United States.”
Kim, office worker in Koreatown, LA, recently received an email. The sender, who introduced herself as Katie Higgins, wrote “Hello” in Korean in the subject line and then asked, “Did you get my previous email?”
“I got the email written in Korean and sent a reply asking what it was about,” Kim says, ”and I got a long reply in Korean.” Kim added, “Then I got a long reply in Korean, saying that Captain Higgins, who works for the U.S. military, wanted to have a ‘real relationship’ and even sent me a picture.”
The emails Kim reported were typical of a romance scam. A romance scam involves a person pretending to be an attractive member of the opposite sex in order to commit credit fraud.
In recent years, scammers have been using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to identify a victim’s ethnicity and contact them using their country’s text, like Kim did.
They catch the victim off guard with elaborate sentences on ChatGPT, and then send convincing Korean emails to scam the victim into money transfer scams.
In the Korean email Kim received, Capt. Higgins wrote, “I found a box of money while fighting Syrian rebels. I need to get back to the U.S., but I need the money first, and then we can talk about how we’re going to live,” and other fluent language.
“The content itself was strange, but I was surprised by the naturalness of the Korean letter,” Kim said.
Han, a Los Angeles resident, was scammed out of $150,000 after a month-long friendship with a strange woman who asked her to invest in cryptocurrency.
“I opened a cryptocurrency trading platform (Kraken), linked my bank account, and bought Ethereum,” Han said. ”Then I transferred my Ethereum to a new trading platform as they told me to do. But the platform they told me about was fake, and I couldn’t find my $150,000 worth of cryptocurrency.”
Han’s scam is a romance scam, or “pig butchering,” that lures people into cryptocurrency fraud.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Secret Service (SS) have warned that romance scams are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
Anytime someone you don’t know expresses interest in you via email, text and phone calls, social media messages (DMs), requests for urgent money transfers, or offers to invest in cryptocurrencies, you should be suspicious of a “scam,” authorities said.
To avoid romance scams, where scammers use social media to extort money, experts advised people to minimize the amount of personal and private information they post on social media.
BY HYOUNGJAE KIM [kim.ian@koreadaily.com]
