I have a Bitcoin client who just lost all his Bitcoin. He isn't wealthy. He finally made it to 1 BTC. I celebrated with him over the phone. But within days of him finally leaving Coinbase to setup a distributed multi-key security and inheritance protocol, he was approached by a “trader” who told him he could double his money. On top of that the trader was an attractive woman who fell in love with him. They were set to spend Christmas together. Since I had recently spent hours getting him set up with his own private keys distributed into a multisig setup with @TheBTCAdviser and @unchained I knew he was beyond safe from silly scams. He can do whatever he wants whenever he wants. He just has them separated for security and inheritance. But as a safety precaution, red flags went up when he requested that BOTH companies sign (rare and odd). That implies that a client lost their single key since only two keys are needed to send or spend his bitcoin. @PeterBTCAdviser (The Bitcoin Adviser) sent me a quick message to make sure my new client knew what he was doing. Why wouldn’t he just use his own key? If he lost it, we would want to help him set up a new 2 off 3 wallet before doing anything. And separately Unchained also found it odd and didn’t sign until they could reach the client for confirmation. My client was falling for a pig butchering scam. I had numerous phone calls (hours!) and a string of text messages with him because he refused to believe me. No matter how much I begged and tried to get as respectfully aggressive as I could he was convinced this was for real, said he was a big boy, and it was his Bitcoin and he wanted to send it to this woman. He was recently divorced with a young daughter, barely had any money except for this Bitcoin, and this woman “loved” him so much that she wanted to help him make quick gains… and then they could be together (he bought her a plane ticket). So I let both companies know that regardless of the purpose the client was requesting these transactions and to lift the red flags. Peter and I had a phone call and said this is just so sad. He’s going to lose all of his bitcoin. But we are not here to censor or judge how people spend their own money. All we could do is impose a delay and try to educate. To hopefully cool him off a little bit and give me more time to talk to him. I had him set up a single signature wallet separately. I said, if you’re sending out of your multi signature wallet let’s at least send whatever you wanna give to this woman to your own wallet first and then from there you can do what you want. And so that bought us a few days with his busy schedule. For a moment had hope. During this time, I sent him articles about the scam. I reminded him about the properties of Bitcoin and what he had… and that he was about to fumble generational wealth for him and his daughter. But he can do what he wants. Bitcoin is permissionless. And as of last night while out to dinner, I received a devastating text message from him saying he had lost it all. * I post this as a warning to anyone else you might know who falls victim to this scam. Bitcoin can’t magically double, and and it certainly can’t double by someone you haven’t met who is also falling in love with you.