Stephen, 68, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, lost £6,000 after being approached on LinkedIn by a glamorous fraudster. He wanted to warn others about the dangers of crypto currency scams.
Stephen was sent a message on LinkedIn by a woman called Alice who claimed to be a finance director in Washington DC but this was a fake identity and alias.
After some polite chat, Stephen said Alice asked him to move onto WhatsApp. There, the conversation turned to crypto currencies.
Alice said that her uncle worked in banking in Hong Kong and that she’d successfully made money with his help.
She encouraged Stephen to get involved and eventually he downloaded trading apps and a virtual wallet to keep his crypto cash in.
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Stephen had an interest in Bitcoin, but he didn’t understand how the system worked so when Alice started talking about it, he thought he might learn something.
After some early successes, Alice told Stephen to log into another trading app and talked him through a series of trades her uncle had apparently recommended.
Stephen said: “All of sudden there were three transactions on the screen.
“She was telling me, ‘Quick, buy long. Buy short!’ And by the end of it I’d made $600 [around £480].
“I went along with it on several occasions. I was saying to myself this is too good to be true – and it was.”
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Stephen transferred another £2,300…
