Description

I met Syndra Lin through an I grew up in California Facebook post in mid august. I resided there in CA before July 2025. We began chatting on facebook messenger and via text. She preferred FB messenger so we talked there. After taking and becoming friends over time since August, she steered the conversation to investing in crypto assets and also a loving partnership/relationship. She mentioned her uncle was and expert in crypto options trading and that I could follow her trades. Lin directed me to the crypto asset trading platform, CBOT, located at https://cboter.com/#/pages/common/login and showed me how to open an account on coinbase, setup a base wallet and then CBOT addin attached to wallet and then to transfer funds. Following Lin’s instructions for trading, I believed my account had grown substantially. She showed me that I could make a withdrawal and a small withdrawal was executed. She then said there was a supermarket that is cyclical, an opportunity to make big money that had diff erent buy in levels, as the funds increased, a also sent additional funds. She sent 200K of funds to my account to meet the base criteria for trade. But when I tried to withdraw funds 12/17/25, 6:34 PM Complaint Submitted - Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) https://complaint.ic3.gov 6/11 from the platform, I was told I needed to pay personal income tax and after, the funds would be released for withdrawal. She said she would help pay the taxes and said we could use my capital and funds she contributed along with 150K from me to pay the taxes over 1 million. After paying the required income tax, I was unable to withdrawal and then customer service advised that there was a fee for account verifi cation. I did not pay the fee and realized this is not right. I learned how to report the incident and have done so here. All told, the I believed I lost more than $800K and may have tax consequences. I would apricate your investigation and reaching out to me for additional details. I hope you can help resolve this matter and help with fund recovery.