There are a lot of financial scams out there these days, and deputies have just encountered a new one involving Bitcoin.
In general, if someone asks you to go to a store and put money on a gift card or pre-paid credit card – or to invest in Bitcoin — and use that to pay over the phone to avoid getting arrested or to fix a bank account issue, that is likely a scam.
An investment in Bitcoin is useful for criminals trying to steal your money because it is hard to track — just like pre-paid credit cards and gift cards.
All three have legitimate uses – but once you spend money on those things and provide that info to people on the phone or over the internet — the money is likely gone and isn’t coming back.
The latest scam occurred earlier this month when a Star woman tried to contact Amazon to figure out why some stuff she ordered hadn’t been delivered but called a fraudulent number she found on the internet by mistake.
The man on the phone told the woman she had been defrauded out of $9,990, but if she withdrew that amount of money from her bank and deposited $9,990 into a Bitcoin kiosk at a local convenience store, she would get her money back.
The man stayed on the phone with the woman after she got the cash from her bank and went to the Bitcoin machine so he could tell her what do.
He told her if anyone from the store asked who she was talking to, she should say it was a family member.
A clerk noticed the woman was having a hard time with the machine and asked her who she was talking to – and later warned her people can get “ripped off” by scammers. The woman told the clerk she was talking to a family member.
She eventually finished the transaction – and lost her $9,990 to the scammer.
Investigators have had a few instances of a similar scam pop up this summer. People have lost significant sums of money, so we would like people to be aware of it.
In general terms, If someone asks you to spend your own money to get money back, that is a sure sign of a financial scam.