It all started out ‘very small, very friendly’
“I was doing a little bit of trading myself. I’d seen something on social media. I clicked on the link, I got contacted, and it basically went from there. It all started very, very small, very friendly, introduced to different brokers, and over a five-month period, it was built up and built up,” says Chris. It was an elaborate scheme, designed to build his confidence in their trading platform over time so that he felt safe investing larger and larger sums of money.
“I was the one that was actually doing the trades, not them,” says Chris. “I wasn’t giving them my money, and they were trading it – I was sat there with an account, seeing everything, all the different coins, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and everything else like that. And I was sat there on the computer, and he would be inviting me over the phone, saying ‘Right, buy this, buy this, and then leave it for a few days,’ and you’d see it making money.
“This went on for maybe two or three weeks. Looking back now, right from the beginning, he would tell me about how the institution basically was the enemy, how the banks don’t want you to do this, because if you’re transferring your money via crypto, then you’re not using the banks, and the banks aren’t going to get their money, so they’re going to lose billions upon billions.”
In fact, the scammer groomed Chris to ignore the very warning messages his bank would give. “Everything he said made sense to me, and so I started moving money through my bank accounts,” he says. “The bank would ring me up and say: ‘Is this a legitimate transfer?’ And I’d say yes. He’d tell me all the questions before the bank asked them and he’d tell me the answers [to give].”
