SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) — A cruel scam known as pig butchering has struck yet another Bay Area resident. This time, an elderly widow in San Jose thought she found new love online. Instead, she was targeted by crypto scammers who took nearly $1 million of her money. It left her with almost nothing to live on.
It’s a brutal wake-up call for victims. They are lured into what seems like a loving relationship — only to find out they’d been trapped into handing over their money. I told you earlier about a Brentwood widower who lost his life savings. Now this Bay Area woman realized she wired her entire portfolio to scammers overseas — and now in her 70s, she could even lose her house.
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Margaret Loke is busy in the kitchen of her San Jose home — but the only food is in pictures on the wall.
“I hardly cook because I’m alone,” she said.
Her kitchen is overtaken instead with paperwork, bank statements, and wire transfer documents — the remains of a heartless scam that took more than a million dollars of her money, leaving Loke with almost nothing to live on.
“Why am I so stupid. I let him scam me!” she said. “I was really, really depressed.”
Loke looks out over the balcony of the two-bedroom condo she bought for retirement, fearing she will lose that too.
“I try to save the house, that’s the only thing I have,” Loke said tearfully. “All my money is gone to the scam.”
Her quiet life was upended last May when a friend connected her with a man on Facebook.
“She says, ‘Oh this is a nice guy… you just say hi to him, that’s it’… I say, ‘We are from San Jose,’ and then he said, ‘Oh I like to, you know, meet people from San Jose and I’m from Texas,'” Loke recounted.
His name was Ed, a businessman also of Chinese descent. They began chatting online, then on the WhatsApp message service
“He was really nice to me, greet me every morning. He send me every day the message ‘good morning.’ He say he likes me and I’m, we are Chinese…” Loke said.
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Every day, they shared details of their daily life… what they ate, where they went, their common heritage.
Soon, he was calling her “honey.”
She called him “love.”
Loke texted: “When I think of someone special, it’s you that comes to my mind… it touches my heart so deep.”
And Ed wrote: “The feelings between us are real and I miss you every day… I hope our love can last forever.”
“Every day he’s saying sweet talk to me… so I say maybe, you know, I’m lonely too right?” Loke said.
Yet he would never meet her in person, and insisted they keep their romance a secret.
“And then he start asking me, what investment do you have? And I say, I’m very simple person, I don’t have any investment,” she said.
“He’s telling me he’s rich and all that, you know,” she added.
Ed told Loke she could be rich, too.
“He says, do you know anything about investing in this crypto thing?” she said. “‘Why don’t I give you $15,000 to invest…’ so I said no, I have my own money.”
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He guided her to wire her money into an online account, and then log in to a crypto investment site.
“I went into the platform to trade $15,000, I make about $24,000,” she said.
The app showed she earned a big profit in seconds.
Ed told Loke to invest more.
“Just trust me I will make a million, over, for you…” Loke recalled.
And so she wired $120,000 from her IRA account, into Discover Bank, and then to the online account Ed had set up.
Again, the app showed big profits.
“Then he said, ‘Oh no, now you have to put in $490,000. So then I say, why so much?” she said.
Ed told her she had to keep investing to reach their $5 million goal.
Reluctantly, she wired another $490,000 from her IRA account. Again, her money seemed to grow.
Ed told her she could make even more
“I’m a simple person, I don’t know how to trade so I follow him, whatever he tell me,” she said.
RELATED: Woman loses nearly $1 million life savings in ‘pig butchering’ scam
She wired him the last $62,000 from her IRA.
But Ed didn’t stop there.
“He wants me to put in another $1 million, so I don’t have the money,” Loke said.
Now Ed was not so loving.
“He was on the phone with me, constantly pushing me and say, you have to borrow,” she said.
She searched for a lender, obtained a $300,000 second mortgage, then wired all that money too.
It seemed like her crypto account now totaled $2.4 million — and Loke needed to cash out.
But then came the shock.
“He freeze it. The money was frozen,” she said.
Ed said she had to come up with a million dollars to unfreeze the account, or lose everything.
“‘You have to do it, you have to borrow from your friend’… but I say my friend would not loan me any money…” she said.
He began threatening legal action.
He also left a chilling voice message: “I don’t want we be enemies… my lawyers contact with you.”
Desperate, Loke consulted ChatGPT.
“ChatGPT told me no, this is a scam, you better go to police station… so I panicked at that time, I panicked and I call him. I say, you are scamming me!” Loke said.
Turns out that all along, Loke had been wiring her money directly to a bank in Malaysia, where scammers picked it up.
It was all a part of a growing scheme known as “pig butchering” with large organizations overseas.
The butchers start fake romantic relationships to lure victims into buying phony crypto.
It shattered Loke’s life.
“I’m trying to help myself to save this house. I don’t know where am I going to stay right?” she said.
Loke lost not only her savings, but she also faces a huge tax bill for withdrawing all the money from her IRA account at once. 7 On Your Side has heard from several other victims of pig butchering.
Be warned. Don’t invest with someone you’ve never met in person.
Take a look at more stories and videos by 7 On Your Side.
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