![]() The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said losses to cryptocurrency-related scams were likely to be far higher than the $109 million it has recorded so far this year. "And so that's why they're targeting Australians because they know that they can get away with it." Australian victims targeted ![]() "From what we've learnt, there's kind of a loop in the system like the criminals know that once the money is sent overseas, it's no longer investigated. The couple documented their experience in a cyber fraud report lodged with police and their banks, but it led nowhere. John said he was in disbelief for a week. "I think we were really upset and angry at ourselves because we kind of let it happen and we invested so much when we shouldn't have," Eve said. "And then that's when they told us that the website we've been using isn't their website." "And then I got my family lawyers to help. "At one point someone broke accent and I was like, 'wait a minute, this is weird'. "I said to Eve 'I'm getting a strange feeling about the way that they're sounding because of some of their accents,'" he said. She later found out the scammers had closed their accounts.Īt the same time, John was beginning to question their investment with the Irish company. "It wasn't like you just randomly sent off some money to a bank account."Įve tried to make a third investment in Coinbase shares of $7,000, but the transaction didn't go through. She said the "brokers" she believed she was speaking to "sounded really confident".ĭo you know more about this story? Email were patient with us and the fact that we'd had heaps of questions about everything and there was official documentation," she said. "I initially invested just under $50,000 and and then I ended up putting in another $15,000 as well." A lot of people make, you know, 2,000 per cent on their money in a couple of months. "You hear a lot of success stories with crypto. "I thought it was all legit as well, and I saw John was doing really well," she said. "They gave us the registration numbers, and so we googled that and just checked typed in 'is this a scam?' That kind of thing, nothing came up."Īfter John put money into the Coinbase launch, Eve decided to get on board as well. "After the first IPO, our trading platform got updated and it matched all the real world events, so it looked really real, and I believed it," he said. John initially put in $7,000 to "test out" the trading platform the company was using. Using its own fake website and investment platform, the scammers had cloned the name and address of Druid ICAV - but John was none the wiser.ĭruid ICAV's activities closely mirrored real-time events, included the initial public offering of a major cryptocurrency exchange. The call was from someone posing as an investment manager from Irish brokerage Druid ICAV, and they offered John shares in Airbnb. One day he received an unsolicited phone call - and that's when the scam began. Queensland couple John* and Eve* have long dreamed of buying their own home.Įve, now 25, started saving her pocket money in primary school, and started investing in Australian shares when she was 18.Īt the start of this year they'd saved more than $110,000.īut before diving into the market, John, 24, had been investing in stocks and started looking for other options to increase his initial house deposit. The scams are run by global syndicates, and the money trail is murkier than ever. "We're also seeing more and more people working from home which presents greater opportunities for criminals to target people." "Criminals are really quick to exploit a crisis," Australian Federal Police Cybercrime Commander Chris Goldsmid told the ABC. But criticisms centre on its exchange rate volatility and its susceptibility to illegal activity and scams.The technology has been praised for its portability, inflation resistance and transparency.Some cryptocurrencies have exploded it value over the past two years.The Australian Tax Office estimates up to 600,000 Australians have invested in "crypto-assets".There are more than 10,000 cryptocurrencies in use around the world.Cryptocurrency, or "crypto", is decentralised "digital money". ![]() These scams have crippled their futures, with hundreds of thousands of dollars funnelled into the hands of cybercriminals and lost forever.Īustralian Federal Police say cryptocurrency scams have "exploded" during the pandemic, with new figures from the Australian consumer watchdog showing a 172 per cent increase in losses between January and November this year, totalling $109 million. They have vastly different backgrounds and financial situations.īut one common thread binds them: they have all been embroiled in scams involving cryptocurrency, the decentralised digital currency. They're three families, all from different parts of Australia. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |