He sent her 30,000 yuan in gifts. Six months later, she transferred 1.22 million yuan to him. Whose money was that 30,000? Her own.
Hongkou, Shanghai. A voice-room streamer who never showed her face, in her twenties, had worked at a company before being laid off and entering the business. She took home two or three thousand yuan a month, barely enough to get by in Shanghai. Really barely. Last August, an account called “Favorite” showed up in her livestream room, showering the room with gifts worth tens or hundreds of thousands of yuan at a time. There were ten people in the room, and each got a gift worth 10,000 yuan.
She added him. He claimed to own two construction companies and have 8.7 million yuan sitting in his accounts. In total, he transferred 30,000 yuan to her.
To her, that 30,000 was more than a year’s wages. To him, it was bait. Guangming Online, Kankan News, and China.com all reported the same thing: the 30,000 itself was money he had tricked her into sending. First he got her to transfer a sum, then used her money to send gifts to her in the livestream room. The generous gift she received was paid for under her own name.
Over the next six months, she transferred 1.22 million yuan to him. Her savings were wiped out; she took out 300,000 yuan in online loans and borrowed 200,000 yuan from private lenders, even dipping into money from family and friends. They had met in person only once or twice.
There’s one detail I think is especially telling. She didn’t put everything on the line from the start. The actual sequence was: start small and see whether the other person paid out. After her first investment, by the fourth month she really did receive her share of that 300,000 yuan. Then, for the “private lending” group, she received the principal and interest on time for the first three days. Screenshots of payments arriving, other group members chiming in—everything looked normal. So she believed it.
Three days. The interest paid over those three days bought the right to withdraw all the principal she would put in later. In crypto, there’s a more blunt name for this tactic: let you cash out first.
On the fourth day, everyone in the group went silent. All that remained was an empty group chat. She flew to Guangdong to see the “construction project.” After she landed, she called, but no one answered. There was nothing she could do. All those borrowers in the group, whose profile pictures kept changing, were controlled by him alone. They registered with different phone numbers and timed their messages. The scenes of “other people investing too” and “other people getting paid” were echoes of her own money making a round trip.
When people see a story like this, their first reaction is often greed, or being blinded by love. I see it differently. What she did was a fairly standard thing: she was trying to assess “whether he had money.” The problem was the evidence. The only proof she had was money he’d paid out himself. And that money had come from her account. You can’t prove a suspect has money using evidence funded by the suspect—that circle doesn’t close.
Luo Gao’s records came to light too. In 2023, he was put on a list of defaulters for failing to pay workers’ wages. The two companies were registered under his wife’s and ex-wife’s names and had no actual operations. Once he got the 1.22 million yuan, he didn’t put a cent into any construction site. He spent 50,000 yuan on drinks in one night, all paid for by her. Prosecutors approved his arrest on suspicion of fraud. He insists it was a loan, but he can’t produce a single construction payment record or building material. There really is nothing.
How much do you think he spent on gifts over the course of a year or more? More than 300,000 yuan. The only thing this man bought in the livestream room was someone calling him “big bro.”
Cut out the middle, and the beginning and end still hold together. So the bridge here isn’t some forced accounting analogy; it’s the mechanism.
This script has played out on-chain many times, and even faster. A project team first sends real coins to early addresses, and screenshots spread everywhere: “This project really pays out.” That one payout is just an advertising expense. It buys their judgment about how much principal you’ll put in later. It’s the same pattern as receiving principal and interest on time for the first three days.
The difference is the cost of fabrication. To create the impression that “other people in the group are investing too,” all you need on WeChat is a few screenshots and a few burner accounts. On-chain, though, you’d have to open a bunch of addresses and pay a bunch of gas fees—and the funds behind those addresses would all point to the same upstream source, making them quicker to trace. Faking it has become more expensive, not impossible. The real difference comes afterward: stablecoin issuers can freeze addresses, and on-chain transactions are publicly visible, so you can just follow the trail. Her 1.22 million yuan went through bank transfers and cash; getting it back would mean asking banks one by one to investigate.
So when you see a scene where “other people are making money too,” first ask: where did their money come from? It’s all there in the transaction records. If all the funds trace back to the same address, there’s only ever been one person in that market.
The reports don’t break down exactly when, or in which transaction, that 30,000 yuan made its way back into her account. No one can say for sure. But the sequence is clear. Give first, then ask for more.
$BTC $USDC $USDT
#比特币 #稳定币 #LivestreamGifts
Hongkou, Shanghai. A voice-room streamer who never showed her face, in her twenties, had worked at a company before being laid off and entering the business. She took home two or three thousand yuan a month, barely enough to get by in Shanghai. Really barely. Last August, an account called “Favorite” showed up in her livestream room, showering the room with gifts worth tens or hundreds of thousands of yuan at a time. There were ten people in the room, and each got a gift worth 10,000 yuan.
She added him. He claimed to own two construction companies and have 8.7 million yuan sitting in his accounts. In total, he transferred 30,000 yuan to her.
To her, that 30,000 was more than a year’s wages. To him, it was bait. Guangming Online, Kankan News, and China.com all reported the same thing: the 30,000 itself was money he had tricked her into sending. First he got her to transfer a sum, then used her money to send gifts to her in the livestream room. The generous gift she received was paid for under her own name.
Over the next six months, she transferred 1.22 million yuan to him. Her savings were wiped out; she took out 300,000 yuan in online loans and borrowed 200,000 yuan from private lenders, even dipping into money from family and friends. They had met in person only once or twice.
There’s one detail I think is especially telling. She didn’t put everything on the line from the start. The actual sequence was: start small and see whether the other person paid out. After her first investment, by the fourth month she really did receive her share of that 300,000 yuan. Then, for the “private lending” group, she received the principal and interest on time for the first three days. Screenshots of payments arriving, other group members chiming in—everything looked normal. So she believed it.
Three days. The interest paid over those three days bought the right to withdraw all the principal she would put in later. In crypto, there’s a more blunt name for this tactic: let you cash out first.
On the fourth day, everyone in the group went silent. All that remained was an empty group chat. She flew to Guangdong to see the “construction project.” After she landed, she called, but no one answered. There was nothing she could do. All those borrowers in the group, whose profile pictures kept changing, were controlled by him alone. They registered with different phone numbers and timed their messages. The scenes of “other people investing too” and “other people getting paid” were echoes of her own money making a round trip.
When people see a story like this, their first reaction is often greed, or being blinded by love. I see it differently. What she did was a fairly standard thing: she was trying to assess “whether he had money.” The problem was the evidence. The only proof she had was money he’d paid out himself. And that money had come from her account. You can’t prove a suspect has money using evidence funded by the suspect—that circle doesn’t close.
Luo Gao’s records came to light too. In 2023, he was put on a list of defaulters for failing to pay workers’ wages. The two companies were registered under his wife’s and ex-wife’s names and had no actual operations. Once he got the 1.22 million yuan, he didn’t put a cent into any construction site. He spent 50,000 yuan on drinks in one night, all paid for by her. Prosecutors approved his arrest on suspicion of fraud. He insists it was a loan, but he can’t produce a single construction payment record or building material. There really is nothing.
How much do you think he spent on gifts over the course of a year or more? More than 300,000 yuan. The only thing this man bought in the livestream room was someone calling him “big bro.”
Cut out the middle, and the beginning and end still hold together. So the bridge here isn’t some forced accounting analogy; it’s the mechanism.
This script has played out on-chain many times, and even faster. A project team first sends real coins to early addresses, and screenshots spread everywhere: “This project really pays out.” That one payout is just an advertising expense. It buys their judgment about how much principal you’ll put in later. It’s the same pattern as receiving principal and interest on time for the first three days.
The difference is the cost of fabrication. To create the impression that “other people in the group are investing too,” all you need on WeChat is a few screenshots and a few burner accounts. On-chain, though, you’d have to open a bunch of addresses and pay a bunch of gas fees—and the funds behind those addresses would all point to the same upstream source, making them quicker to trace. Faking it has become more expensive, not impossible. The real difference comes afterward: stablecoin issuers can freeze addresses, and on-chain transactions are publicly visible, so you can just follow the trail. Her 1.22 million yuan went through bank transfers and cash; getting it back would mean asking banks one by one to investigate.
So when you see a scene where “other people are making money too,” first ask: where did their money come from? It’s all there in the transaction records. If all the funds trace back to the same address, there’s only ever been one person in that market.
The reports don’t break down exactly when, or in which transaction, that 30,000 yuan made its way back into her account. No one can say for sure. But the sequence is clear. Give first, then ask for more.
$BTC $USDC $USDT
#比特币 #稳定币 #LivestreamGifts