The retired nurse brought one bitcoin to scammers posing as fake bank agents. She did not know that the bitcoin address employed to carry out the transaction got owned by the attackers.
A woman from Buffalo, a region located in the north of the State of New York in the United States of America, lost at least one bitcoin after becoming a victim of an attack. The victim expressed that she had lost the funds she had kept in her account for a long time due to her retirement savings strategy.
The scam victim remained anonymous, although she highlighted that she previously worked as a nurse, and after retirement, she supported herself with a part-time job. On his work computer, she came to know that a pop-up window appeared in which she got warned that the equipment used got obstructed and that to solve it, she had to call an included telephone number.
The advertisement turned out to be fake, but she understood that it was something tangible. Hence, the victim immediately called the number, where she got told that her bank account got hacked and that she should move the money she had there quickly as possible, as reported by local media.
So the woman decided to remove in cash the USD 43,000 she housed in her profile, equivalent to a little more than one bitcoin, at the current price appearing in the market.
Later, the retired nurse decided to apply more guidance she had received from a fake bank representative. So, she sent at least $13,500 to a bank in East Asia and housed $29,500 at one of the bitcoin ATMs based at Fastrac on Bailey Avenue in her hometown.
The struggles of the affected woman began to get reflected shortly after when she realized that the funds were no longer under her control. She then filed a legal complaint with the local authorities to get the extracted funds returned to her wallet.
The Buffalo woman explained that the attackers had brought her with a barcode that she scanned at the ATM. She then placed assets into the ATM, going straight into a digital wallet under the attackers’ control.
Grandparents are Common Victims of Scammers who Look for Bitcoin and Other Crypto-Assets
Kathy Stokes, director of an organization focused on retired Americans, expressed that people over 50 years old usually get harmed by different attacks related to cryptocurrencies.
There are often “copycat scams” or people pretending to be someone trusted, usually through phone calls and the internet. Thus, they report a struggle that never happened with a bank account under their control to request later that they click on a link to fix it.
Older people are not the only ones aimed at by cybercriminals, and young people are. In December, a New York-based artist and non-fungible token user, Toddkramer, became the victim of an attack that temporarily made him lose at least 16 tokens belonging to the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club collection.
By: Jenson Nuñez
