It all started when the victim responded to an ad on the social network Odnoklassniki about learning how to make money on cryptocurrencies. Then she was contacted by a certain woman on the Telegram messenger, who promised that “employees of an investment company” would teach her how to trade cryptocurrencies profitably. To do this, a resident of Kyzyl needed to download Skype and then install the ByBit and Coinbase Wallet applications.
Interestingly, the scammers installed real applications for working with cryptocurrencies for the victim. The scheme itself was different – the “analyst” stated that the woman needed to transfer $5,000 in order to gain access to the VIP group for trading training. A Kyzyl resident took out a loan from a bank and transferred 445,000 rubles to the specified account. At the same time, the bank employee warned the client that, most likely, she was transferring funds to scammers, but she insisted on the operation.
“After this, the applicant was added to the group on Telegram and her “mentor” said that another $5,000 was needed in order to deposit money into the account of the previously installed platform and start earning money. The applicant again went to the bank and took out two more loans for a total amount of 595,000 rubles, and also transferred this money, at the direction of the same “analyst,” to an unfamiliar account,” law enforcement agencies of Tuva report.
However, this turned out to be not enough. In order to “really earn money,” the woman was asked for another $5,000. However, this time the Tuvan woman’s resources were exhausted. Having emptied her credit card and taken out loans from microfinance organizations, she scraped together another 145,000 rubles. With the help of an “analyst,” she deposited funds into the Bybit platform (although it is not reported whether it was to her own account). After this, the scammers stopped contacting the victim.
As a result, a 51-year-old resident of Kyzyl lost 1,185,000 rubles. Now investigators are conducting a case under Part 4 of Art. 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Fraud committed on an especially large scale.”
In February, two residents of the Trans-Baikal Territory lost a total of about 5 million rubles in similar fraudulent schemes.
Source: Bits
I am an experienced journalist, writer, and editor with a passion for finance and business news. I have been working in the journalism field for over 6 years, covering a variety of topics from finance to technology. As an author at World Stock Market, I specialize in finance business-related topics.
