Scams
The relationship-investment fraudsters follow a common modus operandi
The Pig-Butchering Scam
a. k. a. Sha Zhu Pan (殺豬盤), Crypto Romance Scam, CryptoRom, Hybrid Investment Romance Scam, Romance Baiting Targets on dating apps and social media are patiently groomed over weeks to become interested in investing in cryptocurrency, forex, gold, etc. The scammers do not ask for money directly, but instead introduce victims to a sham investment website or app where victims feel safe depositing funds. Conspiring with "customer service", the scammers cajole and bully victims into remitting increasingly large amounts of money using a series of psychological techniques and ruses on the website/app they control.
Mining/dApp Scam
Mining scams actually like phishing attacks pretending to be "mining" or "liquidity pools", but instead tricks you into authorizing unlimited withdrawals from your cryptocurrency wallet. They may come with a 24/7 "customer service" chat that give you deceiving explanations. The Scams The mining scams are phishing attacks that tricks you into authorizing permissions on a "smart contract" that actually allow scammers access to your USDT at any time. Whatever the scammers and the site’s customer service claim about their mining pool is a lie. This can include numbers displayed about "your" ETH and USDT, as well as taxes owed and/or pool rules that have been violated.
Mining Pools
Conventionally, mining pools refer to either of 2 activities done on blockchain networks: 1) Liquidity mining pool, whereby those who supply liquidity to decentralized exchanges (ex: Uniswap on Ethereum) are given a portion of fees levied on users of the pool. This is done by providing equal value of two different coins/tokens (ex: $100 worth of ETH, $100 worth of BITC).
Who placed the deceptive smart contracts?
A smart contract is a set of code instructions that could really be anything. It takes some good subject-level expertise and knowledge of the Solidity programming language to uncover exactly what the terms of the contract are.
In this case the Tether company has established the contract for decentralized finance. Some functionalities of the contract allow access to the USDT token, and this is intended for legitimate financial transactions. The scammers use this functionality to steal funds and initiate withdrawals of funds at any time. The funds will transfer to an account they control. Unfortunately once you give authorization, you have pre-agreed to these conditions which outline how the money will flow from your account to theirs.