He was a victim. Now he’s fighting back.

It was 2020 and Troy Gochenour had just moved back to his hometown in Ohio after living in New York City for more than a decade. Like many people that year, Gochenour was out of work due to COVID-19 pandemic social-distancing requirements that caused many businesses to close. He thought it would be the perfect time to start fresh in the place where he was born and raised — and try some online dating.

Gochenour created a Facebook Dating profile, and quickly made a connection with a woman named Kris Gia who was living in Seattle, Washington. After several weeks of talking, she introduced him to something called “liquidity mining,” telling him he could make money by supplying the cryptocurrency Ethereum for liquidity pools. (See “What is mining?”, Coinbase.) Kris told Gochenour that he could get up to 1% in returns per day. But Gochenour didn’t get rich from this operation — he lost money. He’d soon come to realize that his relationship was a scam that stole $25,000 from him.