XHEX Elvere D Smith Anastasia Rodrigo (Instagram @anastasiarodrigo_) Stole all my investment money using a fake cryptocurrency exchange app

https://instagram.com/anastasiarodrigo_

I was scammed by people who pretented to be a girl looking to date on Tinder. She had shared her Instagram account on her tinder profile so I was able to review it. It looked somewhat legitimate and credible. We started talking. She shared her phone number and we moved to whatsapp for the chatting. She pretended to have recently moved from Spain into the city. 

She mentionned about what she did for work, her hobbies, etc., and how she was part time making a little extra money being an investor into Cryptocurrency. I was very interested into the subject so I asked for more details and while she did not look that interested to share, she accepted to introduce me to it. She explained to me she had been trading for 4 years and had lost a lot of money, but ended up finding some way to predict the crypto market prices with a lot of accuracy, making it possible for her to generate profits by doing futures trading. She pretended being able to analyse the blockchain and the "market amplitude", and do complex calculations in such a way that all her long selling or short selling trades would always succeed, converting to easy, instantaneous, substantial profits.

They (and not she because it was a fake account) showed me everything from how to buy bitcoins on Coinbase to how to transfer it on this very shady cryptocurrency trading platform, called XHEX. This crypto currency exchange platform is not legitimate (the application is not on the play store of google), and to install it on my phone they sent me a link to some strange website.

But once installed, the XHEX trading application looks very credible and functional. The application guides you into creating your trading account and supplying your ID for identity verification. You go through a KYC (know your client) process, so you end up truly believing the platform is legitimate and credible.

I still had some doubts about the platform so made several searches on Google and could not really find nothing of substance.

So at first, to get your trust, they will suggest you invest a little amount of your money so that you can test how the XHEX platform works. Do a proof of concept. You do everything yourself. They just teach you how to do it. They will have you make money by doing small easy trades so you always feel like what you are doing is completely safe and under your control, and most of all, reversible, as if at any given moment, you can change your mind, withdraw all your funds from XHEX and stop trading altogether.

The return on investment is extremely fast and high, and while it does feel like it's too good to be true, you rationalize it by thinking that person really found an unknown, secret and very efficient way to predict crypto markets, and they will eventually teach you how to do it as well once you meet together, so it just becomes extremely tempting to put more money and try again with higher amounts.

As the trades take place, they will show you screenshots of the same XHEX application you are also using, showing you how much money they made by trading much larger amounts than you. They will tell you that the next night you will be able to do several trades each generating profits of 17%, so it may be a good idea to put in more money to generate similar amounts of profit.

It feels safe because you trust the platform and think you are on control of everything except the trades. So the trades is where your focus is on, and this is what you are trying to learn about. You just think that you already made good profits and that if a single trade fails, the lost money won't be substantial anyway (17% of the traded amount). Lost amounts after a single trade that failed will be easily recoverable, and you will just withdraw your money and move on.

You will think of strategies of putting in your money and do trades until you double it, withdraw your initial investment, and just continue with the generated money.

Seeing the girl making huge profits (they keep sharing you screenshots), you easily get convinced to put in more money and make more profits from other trades just like they do. They will show you how to withdraw money from the platform. I tried it with an amount of around $2,500, and was able to withdraw my profit on an initial investment of $2,200. Since I had just withdrawn a profitable amount from it the platform felt legitimate and very safe. I felt in good control of everything. But because they will mention about more trades coming in the near future and how they so easily made much more money, you will get tempted to put in more money and trade too.

At this point, a lot of money is already invested and sent on the platform. I had now put around $25,000 and had generated a profit of about $10,000 from trades, but also from increases of the BTC value on the market (this increase was not fake and actually happened on all markets). They will then tell you that the upcoming trades require more money for them to succeed, around $50K. This is when things started to feel weird and stressful for me because involved amounts were getting quite high, I started getting nervous about if for some reason I could not withdraw my money, and those "required" amounts for the trades to succeed felt bizarre.

You will try to understand and will educate yourself as much as possible but you won't understand much of how those trades work nor how they proceed to predict those trades. The scammers simply give you instructions of what amount to invest, at what time, and choosing what kind of trade (short selling or long selling). Strangely, upcoming trades will be farther in the future and require larger amounts. They will talk about trading plans, how they are becoming more difficult to predict because of some instability in the markets for some reason they found in the news.

They will tell you that thankfully, you will have more time to transfer money (as legitimate platforms like coinbase limit the amount of money you can wire per day from your credit card or your bank account) on the platform to prepare for them and make substantial profits. They will pressure you to put in more money for those trades, and doubts on a possible scam will increase. So I started checking in the internet about romance scams, and found out many of those happen with cryptocurrency investments.

I started paying more attention on verifying the legitimacy of the Instagram account and the whatsapp account. I did reserve image lookups of the pictures the "girl" had shared me and came to understand the pictures were fake. At that point I started getting very scared and decided to withdraw all my funds from XHEX. But it did not work.

Funds got frozen for a whole day trying to do it and all kinds of reasons with very low credibility were given by the XHEX support as to why the funds could not be withdrawn. I made more searches on Google about XHEX being a scam and ended up finding other victims on Twitter. They complained that XHEX had stole all their money.

At that point it had become completely obvious that XHEX platform was fake, and that the people I was talking to through whatsapp was controlling what was going on in the application.

I faked being still interested into the girl and into the trades. I tried convincing them that I had a lot of money waiting to be transferred to XHEX on coinbase and other legitimate platforms, but that sending funds in small chunks was quite a hassle (and it was), and that because of that I wanted to withdraw all my funds to coinbase so that I would bring all my funds in a single transaction just before the next trade. But that since the withdrawal was not working, I felt uneasy to send more funds, and wanted to see the withdrawal work before bringing my funds back.

They of course understood the stratageme so the support of XHEX responded to me the reason funds could not be taken out was because certification was somehow incomplete. And in order to complete it and withdraw my funds, I had to transfer more money. I had 30k USD on the platform, and they asked me to transfer 30k USD more to allow me withdrawing the whole 60k. At that point, the scam was utterly obvious and I knew that complying to their demand would just get me to lose more money.

They kept telling me both though the XHEX support and through the "girl" on whatsapp that putting more money was the only way to get certified, and that my funds would be locked in XHEX until I would do so.

I asked the girl, since she had so much money from trades, to lend me money to help me withdraw my funds. She of course refused.

I ended up losing a total of CAD $37,700 on XHEX.