crime

Sze Man Yu Inos, known as "Yuki," was sentenced to 71 months in federal prison on April 23, 2026, for a Bitcoin investment fraud scheme that targeted older women across four US jurisdictions over 14 months.
Key Takeaways
Sze Man Yu Inos, sentenced to 71 months federal prison April 23, 2026.Wire fraud conviction - 18 U.S.C. § 1343.Victims: older women in Saipan, Guam, Washington, and California.Operation ran November 2020 to January 2022.Method: affinity fraud.Forged a federal judge's signature to advance the manipulation.Restitution ordered: $769,355.67 to victims.Forfeiture: $684,848.34.
Between November 2020 and January 2022, Sze Man Yu Inos approached older women in Saipan and Guam, claiming to be a successful businesswoman from a wealthy Chinese family who had made her fortune investing in Bitcoin. She treated them to expensive meals and gifts. She shared fictitious personal problems. She told them they were like mothers to her.
Only after that emotional foundation was established did she ask for money. That sequence, connection first, extraction second, is what makes affinity fraud specifically resistant to the warnings that protect against conventional investment scams.
How affinity fraud works and why it works
Affinity fraud inverts the mechanics of standard investment fraud. Conventional scams exploit greed, they promise returns that seem too good to be true but that victims choose to believe anyway. Affinity fraud exploits something harder to defend against: emotional trust built over time through genuine-seeming personal connection.
"You are like my mom" is not a throwaway line. It is the specific mechanism of control. A victim who has been told she is a surrogate mother faces a psychological barrier that standard fraud never creates. Questioning whether the Bitcoin investment is real means questioning whether the entire relationship is real. For an older woman who values that connection, perhaps more than most, that question is almost impossible to ask. The manipulation works precisely because asking "are you lying to me?" feels like destroying something real.
US Attorney Shawn Anderson named this directly: "Criminals engaged in affinity fraud prey on our willingness to trust others. This defendant chose to target older women across multiple jurisdictions, resulting in substantial financial losses."
The detail that separates this case from ordinary fraud
Most crypto-adjacent fraud involves some degree of technical sophistication, fake platforms, manipulated charts, fabricated wallet balances. This case required none of that. But it did require something more brazen: Yuki forged a federal judge's signature to advance her manipulation.
Forging a federal judge's signature means she was willing to commit a separate and more serious federal crime to sustain a fraud that was already working. That escalation is not the behavior of someone responding to opportunity. It is the behavior of someone who had decided that no boundary, legal, moral, or institutional, would be allowed to interrupt the scheme.
FBI Special Agent David Porter described it as acting "with complete contempt for both the victims she exploited and the rule of law." The scheme continued after federal charges were filed. She did not flee, stop, or attempt to settle. She kept running the fraud while the case was pending, expanding from Saipan and Guam into Washington and California, reaching new victims in larger markets using the same methodology that had worked in the smaller island communities where she started.
What the sentence represents
Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona sentenced Inos to 71 months, plus restitution of $769,355.67 to victims and a criminal forfeiture judgment of $684,848.34, approximately $1.45 million in total financial accountability across four jurisdictions.
Porter's assessment of the case applies beyond this specific defendant: "The defendant built a career out of deception, leaving a trail of financial ruin stretching across several states and impacting dozens of innocent victims." The career framing is precise. This was not opportunistic fraud. It was a repeatable, exportable methodology that started in one jurisdiction and scaled to others, until federal prosecution ended it.
The US Attorney's Office highlighted the case as a warning against affinity fraud specifically. The warning is warranted. Crypto's cultural association with sudden wealth creation makes it an ideal prop for exactly this kind of schem, not because of anything technical about blockchain, but because Bitcoin's reputation for making people rich is credible enough to sustain a cover story that never required a single real transaction.
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