Florence Retiree Lost $222K in Crypto Romance Scam

A retired man in Florence, Alabama, lost more than $222,000 to a crypto romance scam. Federal court documents filed this week say a person posing as a young woman manipulated him into transferring his savings into fraudulent crypto wallets.

The U.S. government has filed a civil forfeiture complaint to permanently seize the funds. WAFF reported June 26 that investigators tracked the money through several wallets and exchanges before seizing it under a federal warrant.

Court papers described a classic “pig butchering” scheme. In this scam, fraudsters gradually build victims’ trust over weeks or months and then direct them to fake investment platforms.

The federal complaint states the victim connected with a person calling herself “Bella” who claimed to be a 23-year-old woman and offered to help him invest in crypto. The conversations moved to the encrypted messaging app Telegram, where they became romantic.

“Bella” then provided step-by-step instructions on how to transfer money out of the victim’s Alabama bank account to a Coinbase account. The money was then moved to cryptocurrency wallets controlled by the scammers. Federal prosecutors say more than $222,000 of the stablecoin USDT was laundered through a series of wallets and exchanges before being seized by law enforcement, according to WTVA’s reporting of the court documents.

Now the government wants a federal judge to order the forfeiture of the seized money as proceeds of wire fraud.

In February 2025, on-chain security firm Cyvers reported that crypto investors lost $5.5 billion to pig butchering scams in 2024. That grew to 200,000 identified cases on the Ethereum network alone, per Cryptopolitan’s earlier coverage. Data from Chainalysis during the same period found that pig butchering accounted for 33.2% of all crypto scam revenue by subclass. Deposits in these schemes were up by about 210% year-on-year.

Michael Pearl, vice president of GMT strategy at Cyvers, called pig butchering “by far the biggest threat” to crypto investors. He ranked it above outright hacks, which stole $2.3 billion in assets across 165 incidents in 2024.

Across the data, 75% of pig butchering victims lost more than half their net worth, Cyvers found. The grooming period ran one to two weeks in 35% of cases. Some scams stretched to three months. Men aged 30 to 49 were the most targeted group, according to the firm’s data.

“The rate at which bad actors are using elaborate pig-butchering scams to defraud innocent people is despicable,” Special Agent Stacey Moy of the FBI’s San Diego Field Office said in a statement tied to a separate 2024 forfeiture case in the District of Columbia.

Federal prosecutors have not identified any suspects in the Florence case. It is not known whether any of the recovered funds will be returned to the victim. The forfeiture action is against the crypto itself, a normal step in cases of fraud when the perpetrators are located abroad.