I Let My Mom Get Crypto Scammed And I’m Happy About It
Lessons on losing life savings from a bad daughter and a bad mother
$162,000. My mom’s entire life savings, set aflame. It was all the money that remained from selling my childhood home.
One final event wiped it clean.
His name was Ron.
The Foundation
life and death // cash rules everything around me
My youth was one word: lack.
Money ran through our hands like sand. We could never grasp onto it long enough, the grains bleeding out between our fingers. And the grit left behind in the creases of our palms could never be shaken off. Always, always we hungered for more. Scarcity trained me so well that I didn’t buy allergy pills until I started college.
We weren’t poor, not really. Outside a few short years while my father was on a student salary and starting his career, we were middle-middle class. Growing up, my father made between ~$40,000 to his peak of ~$80,000 for a family of four. As good as or better than the average American family. The problem was that my father never learned to invest, only to lose. After gambling and failing in the stock market, he would turn his ire onto his wife—an uneducated, stay-at-home mom—and his two children. He never forgave her or us for our uselessness, and abandoned her with divorce in 2018.
Since she couldn’t afford to live on her own, she moved in with me. We cobbled together a fragile coexistence. It didn’t help that we had a quasi-language barrier. To this day my mom still barely knows English, but I speak Mandarin well enough, even if discussing poetry is out of the question. The bigger barrier was that I could count on one hand the number of meaningful conversations we’d ever had. She was just so clueless.
I was a baby bird teaching its mother how to leave the nest. Starting from kindergarten, I did all things English and as an adult, all things money for her. Healthcare fucked up her taxes? I’m on the phone for hours. Hit-and-run totaled her car? I’m dealing with insurance. Can’t understand her retirement IRA account? I log in and make purchases for her. Her problems, big or small or fake, were my problems. She could shout fire in a crowded room, and I would always run in with the fire extinguisher, even when there was no fire.
In late 2022, the stability I provided went up in flames. The tech layoff Armageddon coincided with a flare-up of my chronic illness, forcing me to leave my job. While healing, I kept myself occupied with a fun, unpaid Bitcoin and Ethereum Web3 sabbatical. For the first time in my life, I rested and did what I wanted, while my mom held down the fort at $18 dollars an hour.
Even as our finances became more precarious, we had a buffer: the money she made from selling our childhood family home, which she had won in the divorce. She also took care of me by cooking good Chinese food, Sichuan style—spicy, numbing, bursting with flavor. Meanwhile, we slowly started having more conversations about life, work, and love. Real conversations, unlike the hollow exchanges from my childhood.
The Framing
love with interest // here comes a savior
I was the one who encouraged her to start dating.
“It’s been over 5 years since your divorce,” I told her. “You still have thirty more years to build a happy life.”
So began the summer of 2023: the season of Ron. I wasn’t sure I liked him at first, but when she showed me his pictures, I relented. His face was kind.
Ron lived in Los Angeles, just a six-hour drive from us in Phoenix, and worked in tech. Through context clues, I deduced he worked at Tesla. Soon after, I uncovered his prestigious LinkedIn profile: Stanford graduate, Tesla intern, and eventually Tesla Senior Manager. He didn’t mention Stanford to my mom despite listing it on his LinkedIn, but I chalked it up to humility. A rare feat for status-obsessed Chinese people, so it impressed me.
Every day, Ron chatted with my mom on an app called LINE, popular among East Asian professionals. He sent her photos of the food he cooked, reported on his cat naps, and complimented her tennis skills. He spoke fondly of his nurse daughter and three-year-old granddaughter in San Francisco. He called my mom “xiao sha gua” or “little dummy” which rankled me, but she found it charming. She’s my dummy, I thought. No one else’s.
They called for hours each night, my mom ducking like a giggling schoolgirl into her room. I left them to their hanky panky. My mom was light and joyful in a way I’d never seen before—certainly not with my father and his biting judgments. With Ron, she’d built a new frame full of charm, not control. With Ron, the structure of our lives felt sturdier.
After two months of sweet voice memos, I heard he was teaching her about money. Instinctively, I told her it sounded like a scam. Her eyes went wild with fury. “No, it’s not!” she shouted. “He showed me proof that he knows what he’s doing!” My mom knows me to be harsh, stubborn, and naturally suspicious of people.
Maybe she was right, I was too jaded. Perhaps I infantilized her too much. Ron’s approach was careful and generous, teaching her lessons in money that my father never could. Unlike my father, who wielded money as a weapon, Ron treated it as something to be understood, shared, freely given. The patience he showed my mom sprung from an endless well. He even taught her to be wary of scammers, emphasizing basic security issues like never sharing passwords. I was relieved that she found someone who made money management enticing to her. And secretly, a part of me wondered if Ron could teach me about money, too.
Soon after, my mom told me he was sending her money. It matched perfectly with his generous spirit and the stories he shared about lavishly spoiling the people he cared about. As a widower, Ron loved indulging his family. Once, I wondered aloud to my mom, “How is he so good to you?” She wondered the same but assured me that he would be good to me too, that he would be the father-figure I never had.
I figured they had a soulmate connection. Not unfathomable. My mom, though uneducated, loves to read and think about the world. The two lovebirds always seemed to be chittering about something. And maybe I’d been too influenced by sugar baby blogs I devoured in college, figuring that some men simply liked to spend money on pretty women. I suppose my mom is pretty for her age.
Back then, my mind was also full of abundance. I had just closed out my fun in Web3 and was on the verge of landing the best paying job of my career. Maybe the seasons of our lives have changed, I thought.
The Fault
fissures and fractures // whose fault was it
Fall settled in. It’d been over three months since the season of Ron began.
My mom left her room one day, crestfallen.
“Ron ran into money trouble,” she murmured. My old suspicions roared back to life. I checked his LinkedIn. Gone.1 I looked up his number. Fake.2 I reverse searched his photos. Nothing. Finally, I demanded to see her phone.
“Your money is gone,” I choked out.
I didn’t have to say it. She already knew from the shuttered look on my face.3
What irony. I had been so, so grateful it didn’t happen to me.
When FTX collapsed in 2022, I spent hours on Twitter Spaces, listening to grown men cry to strangers. Hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars, vaporized. Ethereum, lost to the ethers. My heart ached for the missing down payments and college funds—dreams, swept down the drain. “How do I tell my wife I lost all the money we ever saved?” they had wailed. I couldn’t answer those poor men back then, but now…I know how.
In retrospect, the harbingers of my own impending doom were already knocking.
Two months before Ron, I was almost scammed.4
One month before Ron, I did get scammed.5
I thought I learned the right lessons. I even warned my mom about the scams and lectured her to be vigilant.
But when the real one descended, I walked us right into its clutches.
I found out that Ron and my mom had never video called. I had only assumed what their late-night calls entailed. But there were no real-time pictures or videos of his face. It was just his voice on LINE.
And of course, the money he sent her wasn’t his. It was stolen from other victims. My mom had been used as a mule to cleanse the dirty money while he primed her for a pig butchering scam.
I tried to comfort her. I told my mom it’s not her fault, millions of people get scammed.6 Then I turned my despair and fury onto the platforms she used.
Fuck LinkedIn for allowing fake accounts. Fuck Match.com for letting fake numbers in. I especially seethed over the banks. I fantasized about suing JP Morgan and Bank of America, those useless fucking shitbags that let her wire money when she couldn’t even read the damn documents she signed.
It’s LinkedIn’s fault, the dating site’s fault, the banks’ fault. Anything but mine.
I was a good daughter.
The Rot
bitter roots // the only inheritance was decay
Content warning: brief descriptions of child abuse
February 2020. One month before the pandemic. Three years before Ron.
My mom moved into a home I purchased. Fourteen hundred square feet with pitch-black flooring. Both our names on the title, just my name on the mortgage. Her money was hers, my money was hers too.
Our house might be quaint if it weren’t so gloomy, and not only because of the floors. It was dark and rotten with resentment. I had never wanted to leave Silicon Valley to help my shitty family. My first home purchase wasn’t even a house I wanted. My mom chose it, in the neighborhood she raised me in, by the high school she drove me to.
And I was locked in. Quarantined with my mom, reliving our sordid history.
“I treated you like an adult since you were a child,” she admitted to me once. “I never thought you needed my help.” Indeed, my prime memories are of her passed out on the couch, the TV blaring a grating Chinese soap opera. When she won the childhood home in the divorce and sold it, she neglected to manage the money the same way she had neglected me. She sat on it until late 2021.7
By October 2021, all she wanted to do was invest in DWAC, a Trump-associated stock. Trump had replaced her soap operas. Day in and day out, QAnon was all she listened to. At her insistence, I invested her money into DWAC. I thought maybe she would at least shut up about Trump if I did.
She never shut up about Trump, so I tried to ignore and forget about it.
February 2023. One-and-a-half years after buying DWAC. Six months before Ron.
During my Web3 sabbatical, I realized it was time to fund my mom’s retirement IRA account. I logged in and stared. Her net worth had halved to $162,000, thanks to DWAC tanking in value.
I shouldn’t have listened to her, I thought numbly. The hollow feeling didn’t last long. All the years of pent-up memories rose up over the numbness, uncontainable, the cracks widening in a foundation rotten to the core.
All the times she denied me basic medication I needed.
All the times she said I ruined her life and wished I’d never been born.
All the times she called me a lazy piece of shit—even when I was hospitalized.
All the times she bragged about never saving a single cent for my college education.
All the times she pummeled me with her chopsticks, fists, sticks. Innocent objects. I remembered the feeling of a cheekbone almost breaking open from the force of a yellow plastic camera.
I remembered, I remembered, I remembered.
And I sold that Trump bag of shit with relish.
May 2023. Three months later. Three months before Ron.
I confessed that I sold her stock.
I had never seen my mom sob that hard before.
She didn’t cry when my father attacked her. She didn’t cry as much when her mom died. She didn’t even cry that hard when she thought I was going to die in high school.
“You’re just like your father,” she screamed at me through tears. “You disrespect me. You think I’m dumb and not worth anything!”
She told me she was never listening to me again and to never, ever touch her money.
Fine.
I don’t want to take care of you anyways, I thought.
The Fire
kindling, set, match // some say the world will end in fire
August 2023. Three months later. Ron arrived.
The kindling was set, smoldering at the center of our house.
Once, earlier in her relationship with Ron, my mom asked me if I wanted to see the specifics Ron had taught her about investing.
“It’s your money,” I reminded her flatly. “You said you didn’t care about my money advice anymore, remember?”
At that time, she had only lost $5,000 to him. Small, simple transfers that he walked her through. If I had looked at the details like she’d wanted, I would’ve seen through the scam immediately. Back then, the flames were small. Containable.
But I shooed her away.
I could make a million excuses. It was late. I was still recovering from illness. I was job hunting. But really, I was thinking: It’s your money to deal with, win or lose.
It’s time you take full responsibility for your life.
It’s time you stop blaming me for every-fucking-thing, you dumb bitch.
I wanted to escape her endless problems. Let Ron handle the fires. He’s the one who wants to deal with her, not me. But Ron hadn’t come to extinguish the flames and rebuild the house. He came to stoke the fire. And me?
I didn’t just let my mom fall prey to him.
I didn’t just turn a blind eye until it was too late.
I didn’t just lose the battle against his raging fire.
Towards the end, I became Ron’s unwitting accomplice. At my mom’s request, I stepped in, all too eager to assist with the large wire transfers. I wanted to push her out of the nest and make her take flight with Ron, far away from me, never to return.
I guided my mom in navigating her bank accounts, her sitting beside me, him on the phone. I listened to Ron teach my mom about account and routing numbers, about receiving and sending wired money. I showed my mom how to find her account details, ensuring she could take her numbers to the banks.
I helped my mom hand Ron the keys to her kingdom.
Ron probably thought I was a greedy moron. He had once scolded my mom for buying me cheap statement rings, exclaiming that I deserved real jewelry. He probably thought he’d won me over through sheer avarice. Wrong. I might be a moron but I’m certainly no glutton. Not for money, that is.
He had me because of the rot in our home. It left a cold, sickly mildew everywhere, and I welcomed Ron in, his presence a warm bath, a crackling fire in the chimney. I let him fill the cold spaces, his false promises heating the house. The warmth felt so good at first.
But the fire grew, and it didn’t dry the rot—it swallowed the house whole.
My mom needed her baby bird to put out the fire.
But I dropped the fire extinguisher and walked away.
The Ashes
birth and rebirth // i hold with those who favor fire
Looking back, we were lucky.
The fire didn’t spread. My mom didn’t borrow money from family or friends like Ron had asked her to. We were the only ones to burn.
Until now, I’d cast us as victims in a neat frame tale: our foundation and frame met a fault line called Ron, and that’s why the walls came tumbling down. I hadn’t told anyone that the fault was the long broken line of my life: the abusive childhood home, the Trump stock I sold behind my mom’s back, Ron the scammer, and how I helped him rob my mom.8
Somehow, this is the only thing my mom doesn’t blame me for. Maybe it’s because she’s finally seeing where she let the rot seep in. My mom tells me now that this is the price she had to pay for the past, a reckoning for how she treated me. Self-centered as ever, she frames the scam as her punishment, her noble suffering. She’s still spinning herself as the axis that I revolve around. But it’s a start.
Losing $162,000 also doesn’t change anything material. I still have to take care of my mom for the rest of her life, even if the money magically reappears. Our relationship now isn’t good—not at all. But maybe I’ll look forward to taking care of her, instead of burning with resentment. The fire cleansed the worst of it: the blame, the bitterness, the endless cycles of anger. What remains is lighter.
Money is also never life or death, a belief I held my entire life until now. Nothing I did, not even taking risky bets in crypto, could fully shake it off. When I was almost scammed once and then actually scammed twice, I tormented myself for weeks, berating myself for the stupidity. At best, I could stretch the belief, but it always snapped back inside me, intact.
Then came Ron, the third scam, the false savior who strangely enough, saved me in a different way. Once, twice, three times the charm. Before Ron, I saw the scams as harbingers of doom. After Ron, I see them as signs from the heavens. I needed this absolute worst case to happen, to lose it all—my mom’s savings, the last scraps of my role as a good daughter—and wake up the next day, still alive, to bury that belief six feet under.
This was destiny. This was me, setting myself on fire. The flames needed to burn the rotten house to the ground so I could let go. Phoenix called me home so I could shed the old feathers and start anew.
No wonder my soul felt so calm in the aftermath.
When God asked me where Sodom and Gomorrah were, I led his angel to our doorstep.
But I am not Lot’s wife. I’m not looking back at the wreckage. And I am not my mom’s baby bird with clipped wings of resentment anymore. I’m a different kind of creature, a myth reemerging from the end of the world.
I poke my head through the ashes, feeling the warmth of something new.
Thanks to the following for their feedback! This essay had the most polarized feedback of the three I wrote in WOP. I tried to reconcile them with the narrative structure I felt was most true to me.
V1: Cam Houser, , , , , Timothy Brathwaite, , Jennifer Scott, , Tahsin Kahn, , , , ,
V2: , , Rose again, ,
And thank you to those I met in various gyms and breakout sessions for the great conversations and ideas/title generation: Leo Ariel, , Matthew Beebe, Amit Bhatia, Benjamin Setor (feedback/idea buddies), , Timothy Brathwaite, , Roy Naquin (who shared his own crypto scam story), , , and (for the Write About Yourself Unsparingly lesson)
His deleted LinkedIn was https://www.linkedin.com/in/ron-li-b8b436152
His number was bought on Bandwidth.com, known for fake numbers
He was clever, having her download the real Kraken and Coinbase apps but directing her to use the webpage navigator inside the apps to send money to a fake site called Coinutpool, now defunct. That way, it would still sound like she was using the official Kraken and Coinbase apps.
I interviewed with an MLM after they posted on Handshake. My alma mater banned them after I reported it.
I lost an NFT worth ~$3,000 at the time. I reported it to OpenSea (who marked it as stolen) and Blur (who did nothing). Fuck you Blur.
Since the pandemic, over $75 billion have been stolen in pig butchering scams. Scammers are often themselves victims of human trafficking and forced to scam people.
The storyline isn’t quite this simple. My father had forced my mom to move out of the childhood home and then sold it himself first, then used the money to buy a horrible McMansion with a cheap build and a stupid high mortgage. My mom later won the McMansion in the divorce, but couldn’t afford the payments. I also couldn’t at that time; I was the only one in my family with a job, and that job was under threat in the early days of the pandemic. So she sold the McMansion and sat on that money until late 2021.
I barely tell the frame tale to begin with, and when I did I couldn’t tell the full truth, not even to my therapist. If you’re reading this as my therapist - hi! You knew I was fucked up already.
Lily, this essay felt like watching a house burn while you walk through it, narrating each flicker of flame with unflinching clarity.
The way you weave the scars of childhood, the allure of hope, and the crushing weight of responsibility into a single thread is haunting.
It's like trying to outrun a shadow that was never yours to carry...
Someone close to me once fell for a too good to be true investment, and while the numbers were smaller, the aftermath still felt like cleaning ash off every surface of our lives. So apt.
ALSO, Ron deserves his own circle of hell, preferably one where his LinkedIn is forever just one connection short of credibility.
This was breathtaking, Lily! I'm amazed at how raw and emotional it made me to read it, even though i've seen the story a few times already. You have done magic here!