County Down Man Loses All His Money to Crypto Fraud

A man in County Down, Ireland has lost all his money to a crypto scam.

How One Man Lost Everything to a Fake Crypto Scheme

The victim – who wishes to remain anonymous – is alleged to have invested a six-figure pension sum into a fraudulent cryptocurrency company. He’s now telling other people to avoid the scam and what they can do to keep themselves protected.

In an interview, he commented:

It started just over a year ago. I noticed an ad that was endorsed by two well-known celebrities showing you could earn more money than you could earn in a bank. I started with £250. I didn’t know anything about how cryptocurrency worked. I knew it existed, but I didn’t know the ins and outs.

Everything seemed fine at first. The company had what appeared to be a legitimate website. There was also a personal client manager assigned to the victim, and all the dealings took place over the phone with a live person, never online. The man says he got good returns in the beginning, and there was nothing to insinuate he was trapped in a lie. He says:

Nothing appeared to be strange. There were no red flags flying in my mind. Every question I asked I got answers to, so there was nothing to alert me that I was going down a very rocky road. It’s ironic that from the very start I kept a very detailed spreadsheet of all the transactions and the trading. I wasn’t frightened at that stage. I was using money but if I lost it, I could survive.

After several months of investing (at that stage, he had given roughly 5,000 pounds), he was asked to join what was known as the firm’s “retirement section,” a special division devoted to a select group of customers. The man said:

They were quoting unbelievable figures and when I asked about tax, they said cryptocurrency is unregulated and I was thinking ‘I’m not sure,’ but they enticed [me] in. Then the gentleman – or maybe gentleman isn’t the right word – the man who was my client manager went off, supposedly with Covid, and another man was assigned to me.

Things took a nasty turn from here. After joining the section, the man was told that he had to invest more money as a means of providing insurance on his account. He was told that the funds would never be traded and that he could pull it out any time he wished.

His Money Had Been Illegally Traded

Later down the line, he logged into his account and noticed that the insurance funds had indeed been traded. He said:

When I checked the cryptocurrency market websites that had nothing to do with this company, you could see where the different types of cryptocurrencies were trading and that confirmed what was happening on my account.

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