The scammer gave her the password. That was the whole trick
A woman in Beijing lost more than $100,000 to a man who said he worked at Microsoft. He didn't need to hack anything — he just handed her a Microsoft Teams login and let the brand do the rest.
Zhao is in her thirties and lives in Beijing. In May she lost over $100,000 to a romance scammer who said he was a researcher at Microsoft. They met on Xiaohongshu, the Chinese social app, and he asked to move the conversation to Microsoft Teams — and offered her an account and password to use. "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.
On Teams he talked about their future together, then introduced a crypto investment project he said would pay off faster than stocks. Zhao took out loans from several banks so she could put in more. Then he vanished with the money. And here is the part that should make anyone's stomach drop: she can no longer log into the Teams account he gave her, so she has no chat logs to hand the police.
Anyone who has ever been asked to "move this chat somewhere else" — which now means almost everyone. Job hunters, especially: WIRED reports scammers pose as recruiters filling open positions, and a fake interview on a real corporate app looks more legitimate than a WhatsApp message, not less. Landlords fielding rental inquiries and people on dating apps are targeted the same way. And anyone with a first few thousand in crypto and a fear of missing the next thing: the pitch Zhao got was that crypto pays off faster than stocks, and she borrowed from banks to chase it. Tan Chenxin, a software engineer in New York, nearly fell for the Webex version this week — he checked who made the app, saw Cisco, and that reassured him. Checking the brand is exactly the wrong check.
Two things are now testable. Microsoft has discontinued the personal version of Teams in China, so the service is only available there through enterprise accounts — watch whether app store reviews keep filling up with scam complaints anyway, since the scammers were using enterprise features all along. And Zoho says that as of August 27 it disabled online payments to Cliq in China, suspended every account created by the suspected scammer it found, and plans to discontinue the free version of Cliq in China. Whether that stops the pattern or just moves it to the next respectable app, nobody has said. Cisco did not respond to WIRED's request for comment.
Zhao went back. In August she posed as a fresh target to get the scammer talking, and asked why not WeChat. He said his colleagues could read his work messages, so Teams "is like our secret base together." She asked what her odd username meant. "The account was assigned by the software when you purchase it from Microsoft," he said. Every answer sounded like corporate IT. That is the whole product he was selling: the sound of a real workplace.
Sources: WIRED, "Microsoft Teams Has Become a Haven for Scammers in China" by Zeyi Yang, August 28, 2026 (Made in China newsletter).
Мошенники превратили корпоративный мессенджер Microsoft в инструмент «разделки свиньи»: жертвам создают аккаунт внутри своей организации, а потом отключают его — и переписка, единственное доказательство для полиции, исчезает вместе с деньгами.
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