Nurse Loses Life Savings, Job After Falling Prey To Bitcoin Scammers Online

A woman from Buffalo, New York was reported on Tuesday, April 12, to have been scammed by a criminal organization who used a fake bank e-mail to get her to transfer her money into Bitcoin which she then put into the scammers’ wallet.

The woman, a retired nurse who has asked to not be named, was reportedly using her laptop when a scammer sent her a pop-up claiming that her finances had been hacked, and that the only way to save her money was to send it to another financial location for safekeeping, according to the New York Post.

In a panic, she followed the scammers’ instructions on where to send her money, wiring $13,700 to a bank in East Asia and converting $29,430 into Bitcoin through a Bitcoin ATM, which she sent into her scammers’ digital wallet. She was fired from her part-time job because of this, as she gave the scammers access to her work computer, WKBW reported.

“It's not her fault,” AARP's Director of Fraud Prevention Kathy Stokes said. “[Hackers] know what to do to get us under a highly emotional state. They call it 'getting under the ether.' Could be fear, love, excitement.”

“If you feel yourself getting excited or upset from an email, phone call or whatever, try and connect that with an 'OK I have to be skeptical here,' because once there it's hard to back out,” Stokes explained.

Todd Maher, who works for the financial crimes consultancy firm BitSource AML Solutions, said that the woman would be unlikely to get her money back due to how Bitcoin transactions currently work, especially as the wallet was tracked to be somewhere in Kolkata, India.

“This is organized crime. She is up against a sophisticated criminal operation. They got the money, the time, the playbook, they have employees and it's us against them,” Stokes said.

“There's always going to be scams, there's always going to be bad people,” Maher said. “The best thing we can do is make sure the Bitcoin ATM [companies] are doing what they say they're doing.”