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Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

That’s not my read from the article:

> she invested in about $4.6 million worth of cryptocurrency through the app Yobit Pro, according to a recent lawsuit. When the app reflected a balance of about $7 million, Vaca attempted to withdraw the funds, but was told she'd need to deposit an additional $500,000 for "taxes."

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Looks like a typo. Although the initial 4.6 million barely sorta existed in the same sense that all these crypto fortunes did, I assumed they were referring to the +2 million growth as being a further fabrication on top of it.

Further down the article, the lawsuit is cited: "As a result of Google’s material misrepresentations and other deceptive conduct, Ms. Vaca has been significantly damaged, including, but not limited to, financial losses of more than $5 Million, severe emotional and psychological distress, and the loss of the real estate business she spent most of her adult life trying to build," her lawsuit states.

So according to the article she did inverst the 4.6m.

She apparently sent $4.6m, over a period of months, thinking she was buying that much Bitcoin, but instead received nothing, not even Bitcoin. Whether you think Bitcoin is real or not, if she'd actually bought Bitcoin she wouldn't be out $4.6m, just up or down depending on what the market did in the interim, which isn't "went to zero."

The initial $4.6 million was US cash, and therefore was real, or as real as money can be.

There's not a good way to know. Crypto is scammers scamming scammers, and often deluded ones at that. So they could be lying or confused about what was the original investment made of.

You're right, thankyou, I seem to be mistaken. I guess I've been watching too many scam videos on YouTube and went into the article with the preconception that this was a typical pig butchering scam.

I'm still having a hard time believing someone would dump $5m into a dodgy app but that does appear to be what we know so far.

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