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

In 2021, Troy Gochenour became a victim of cryptocurrency fraud after striking up a correspondence with a scammer he met on a dating app. The Ohio-based voice actor talks to Fraud Magazine about his experience as a fraud victim and how it transformed him into an activist raising awareness and fighting against cyber scams.



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.

This past September, the FBI reported in its first Cryptocurrency Fraud Report there were more than 69,000 complaints in the U.S. about cryptocurrency schemes in 2023, with people losing more than $5.6 billion to fraudsters. Most of those losses were due to pig butchering scams in which fraudsters develop online relationships with victims to defraud them with cryptocurrency schemes. Many operate overseas in cyber scam centers in Southeast Asia run by transnational organized crime syndicates. Gochenour’s story is a case study in how fraudsters often ensnare victims through dating apps, steal money and break hearts. (See “Crypto scams stole $5.6 billion from Americans last year, mostly from older people,” by Kevin Collier, NBC News, Sept. 10, 2024 and “Billion-dollar cyberfraud industry expands in Southeast Asia as criminals adopt new technologies,” UNODC Regional Office for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Oct. 7, 2024.)

Gochenour talks to Fraud Magazine about his experience as a fraud victim, how it affected his life and how he got involved in the fight against cyberfraud. (The interview has been edited for length and clarity.)


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