RAIPUR: A man was duped of ₹81 lakh in Chhattisgarh’s Rajandgaon district after a Chinese woman lured him into investing in crypto with a promise that he would get three times returns, police said on Tuesday.

The National Cyber Crime Portal, in a press release, said that the online “pig butchering” scams that started from China has gone global after an Indian was duped of ₹81 lakh by a Chinese woman through investment in cryptocurrency.

The victim, Dr Abhishek Pal, a dentist, lodged a complaint with Kotwali police station of Rajandgaon district after which police on Sunday registered a case under IPC sections 420 (cheating) and 406 (criminal breach of trust) and sections 66 (computer related offences) and 66D (cheats by personating) of the Information Technology Amendment Act 2000, and started investigation.

“The accused, one Anna Li suspected to be from Hong Kong, befriended the complainant and lured him to invest in crypto currency and transfer it to a MetaTrader 5 application and later blocked his access to his funds amounting to ₹81 lakhs as the website was already compromised. This is the first case in Chhattisgarh and an emerging field altogether itself. Many such scams have taken place across the world. We are following various leads in this case like binance exchange transactions, IP addresses, social website intelligence, etc,” said Gaurav Rai, a probationary Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, who is investigating the case.

Called “sha zhu pan” in Chinese, or “pig butchering” in English, the scam involves the perpetrator (beautiful Chinese women) building a relationship, often romantic but not always, with the victim over months, akin to fattening the pig, before convincing them to invest money into a fake venture, slaughtering the animal, said the press note issued by the National Cyber Crime Portal.