Divya Gadasalli fell victim to a fraudster in 2022 and lost nearly $8 million on investments in questionable cryptocurrency schemes.
The victim and her attorneys attempted to implicate the cryptocurrency exchange Binance for condoning fraudulent transactions and insufficient customer protection.
The investigation revealed that Ghadasalli met a man named Jerry Bulasa on the dating app Tinder.
For months, Bulasa has been telling Gadasalli about how he makes a lot of money from investing in cryptocurrency.
This, according to Gadasalli, coincided with a period in life when the woman longed for financial independence.
Bulasa convinced Ghadasalli to make his first $400,000 investment in cryptocurrency assets through bank accounts he specified.
According to the victim, after the first investments, she was able to withdraw about $30,000 a month in cash, which convinced her that the new acquaintance was really investing with high returns.
Bulasa then recommended that Gadasalli invest in a cryptocurrency brokerage called Digital Fund, which would pay regular dividends of up to $70000 per month.
To this end, Divya Gadasalli exchanged about $10 million for Tether (USDT) staplecoins through the services of the Binance exchange.
The assets were then transferred to the cryptocurrency wallet address of a brokerage firm.
At this point, contact between Divya Gadasalli and Jerry Boulas broke off, after which the scammer deleted all of his social media accounts.
In March 2022, Gadasalli sued Binance and several other defendants, including TD Bank, Abacus Federal Savings Bank and the Poloniex exchange, in Texas District Court, seeking damages.
Gadasalli’s attorneys said Binance was implicated in the extortion because it provided exchange and funds transfer services to the fraudster.
Lawyers argued that Binance and Binance.US are the same entity, with fraudsters using VPNs and the exchange not following security rules when accessing services.
But U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant ruled: there is no evidence that Binance Holdings aided or abetted the asset theft.
“Plaintiff cannot point to a single fact of how Binance was actually involved in the. In addition, Gadasalli cannot prove that the court is obligated to take any action against the Exchange.
The fraud occurred in Texas, even though Binance and Binance.US are prohibited from operating in the state,” Judge Mazzan said.
Last year, a U.K. resident became a the victim of a cryptocurrency scam on a dating site. He placed £150,000 (about $200,000) in bitcoins on a fake trading platform.