Fraudsters in China are exploiting Microsoft Teams to run romance and cryptocurrency investment scams, tricking victims into transferring large sums of money through the enterprise messaging platform. The scheme has generated a wave of complaints, with losses ranging from $1,500 to $300,000 per victim.
The scams follow a consistent pattern. Fraudsters first contact targets on Chinese social media platforms — in at least one case, Xiaohongshu — before directing them to Microsoft Teams, where the scammer provides login credentials for an account. Once on Teams, the fraudster builds a relationship with the victim and introduces them to a cryptocurrency investment opportunity. When the victim transfers money, the scammer disappears. Because victims use accounts provided by the scammers, they are often locked out afterward and cannot retrieve chat logs for police.
One Beijing woman, identified only as Zhao, says she lost over $100,000 in May 2026 after a scammer posing as a Microsoft researcher cultivated a romance with her. She took out bank loans to invest more. “I didn’t think much because I had used this app before. And since it was developed by Microsoft, I kind of trusted it,” she told WIRED. After going public on social media, Zhao says she was contacted by dozens of other victims describing identical experiences.
A WIRED analysis of 500 reviews of Microsoft Teams on Apple’s Chinese app store over the past 18 months found that 30 percent contained explicit complaints about scammers. The oldest scam-related review dates to 2022. Some local law enforcement bureaus in China have issued warnings naming Teams as a tool used by scammers, and Chinese professional platform Maimai has reportedly added automatic alerts when users send messages containing high-risk keywords like “Teams” or “Skype.”
Microsoft says it investigates abuse reports and takes action against accounts that violate its policies. In June 2026, the company began displaying a warning banner to Teams users in China about common scams. It also discontinued the personal version of Teams in China, restricting the service to enterprise accounts only.
The scheme, which victims describe as a “pig-butchering” scam — a term for long-con fraud that builds trust before extracting money — suggests that trusted brand recognition may be a deliberate part of the deception, making users less likely to question the platform’s legitimacy.
Source: WIRED