Scammers have taken more than $1.2 millions from an Alaska couple in a complex scheme that depleted their retirement savings and then turned it into cryptocurrencies.
This is according to a court order in connection with the federal government’s seizing of cryptocurrencies from accounts that scammers are said to have employed.
The civil forfeiture paperwork submitted on Thursday do not mention the perpetrators or victims, who are in their 90s, and who spend the majority of their time in Alaska as well as Arizona.
The court papers outline the federal authorities’ claims about what occurred:
The incident occurred in June of 2022. One those affected was using the personal computer when a message popped up on the screen. It contained an advertisement claiming to be an official from Microsoft Corporation. It stated that the victim’s computer was infected and offered a telephone number to contact for help.
They dialed the number and on the other side of the phone, scammers appeared to be representatives of Microsoft or Morgan Stanley, which held their investment portfolios. They told victims that they must transfer their retirement savings to what they believed was a government-issued account in order to protect them.
In the direction of scammers they arranged for an array of wire transfers to the bank in California after which they transferred the money to cryptocurrency through an account at an exchange for virtual currencies called Binance US that was outside of their control.
The scammers later transferred cryptocurrency to other accounts, in a series which a federal attorney has described in a court document as an “money transfer pipeline for money laundering.”
Agents of agents from the Anchorage FBI office have seized money from five accounts in the month of October 2022. However, because the exchange rates for different crypto currencies fluctuate the amount of the money seized is value to U.S. dollars or how much of the stolen cash they represent.
Assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case didn’t respond to an email on Friday asking for comment.
The civil forfeiture report confirms that there an investigation into criminals in connection to the case, however it is unclear, as of far, whether the investigation could lead to prosecution of the scammers.
