Wheat Ridge woman bilked out of $16K through PayPal, cryptocurrency scam
WHEAT RIDGE, Colo. (KDVR) — A Wheat Ridge woman fell victim to scammers preying on the fact she has a PayPal account, losing about $16,000 in the incident.
“She was embarrassed initially to even tell anyone or come to get assistance, but she was a victim of something that was very convincing to her,” Wheat Ridge Police Detective Reyna Johnson said.
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Wheat Ridge police provided FOX31 with the convincing-looking invoice the victim received through email. She thought it came from PayPal based on the branding, but it came from a Google email account, which detectives say was the first red flag.
“The victim did have a PayPal account, so she went and called the hotline that’s on the invoice,” Johnson said. “And from there, the person that helped her was very kind, convincing and assuring her that would help her correct the issue.”
The second red flag is the phone number listed on the invoice. Johnson said consumers should always verify that number with the company’s help line number on an official website.
For this victim, phone calls with this so-called customer assistance line evolved into texts and calls from a different number with instructions on how to deposit installments of what the victim supposedly owed.
“In total, it’s around $16,000,” Johnson said. “She was going to her bank instructed not to talk to anyone about it, not to talk to her bank about it, and then going to this ATM and depositing cash into the ATM.”
This was not just any ATM.
“She deposited into a bitcoin or Coinme kiosk, they are located all over the metro area,” Johnson said. “The thing that’s complicated about those is it doesn’t give you a legitimate Bitcoin wallet that the transaction is going to. It uses a phone number and then whoever has that phone number receives a code to use.
“I can’t really think of a legitimate purpose for these,” Johnson continued. “So, if someone’s trying to deposit into a bitcoin or a Coinme ATM, or kiosk is what they’re called, that is a big red flag.”
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Johnson said this victim’s financial institution will not give the victim her money back because they say she voluntarily withdrew the money. Now, detectives are trying to track down the scammer through phone numbers they used for calls, texts and deposits.
“The common thing of the scams is playing on emotions in some way, this person was very convincing,” Johnson said.
Wheat Ridge isn’t the only department seeing more cryptocurrency-related scams. Parker Police Department recently put out an alert about a dramatic increase, with victims reporting more than $800,000 in cryptocurrency-related scams in just the last six months.
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