A Virginia man contacted NBC4 Responds after his life savings were nearly wiped out, and now he wants to warn others.
"I've been financially assaulted, and it's a devastating feeling," Charles Cox told us.
He's still in shock over losing $272,000 to someone he thought he trusted.
Cox thought everything was fine until one day when he was working from home and a woman knocked on his door. She told Cox she was from Fairfax Adult Protection Services and was there because someone notified the agency that Cox was wiring thousands of dollars and they were concerned.
"And she said, 'Mr. Cox, we have reason to believe that you’ve been scammed,'" he recalled.
It began in August 2023, when Cox said a man by the name of Jansen David sent him a friend request on Facebook. Seeing the two had mutual friends, Cox accepted it.
"He said he was living in Denver," Cox recalled.
The two started chatting on Facebook Messenger, until Jansen suggested they take their conversations to WhatsApp.
Their early chats seemed innocuous, and the easy conversation went on for months. They talked about family, cooking, past relationships and work.
"In addition to his job, he was doing you now, some crypto," Cox said. "He showed me some stuff. He said, 'Do you want to, you know, maybe invest?'"
Cox didn’t see the harm in this. He'd heard about romance scams and knew better than to send anyone money, but this seemed different. His friend sent him a link to what appeared to be a bitcoin website.
He started off small, investing $1,000, and believed he made some money. Screenshots of his account showed the more he invested, the more he made.
"It’s a new opportunity to make money and enhance my retirement," Cox recalled thinking.
The stakes got higher in December, when Jansen convinced him to go big. Cox put in $185,000.
But a few days after wiring the money, that knock at the door from Adult Protection Services brought him back to reality.
How this cryptocurrency scam works and the red flags to watch for
"The thing that I’ve subsequently learned [was] that it was a complete fake," Cox said.
The bitcoin website was fake. The crypto account was fake. The name on the wire transfer was fake. And even the Facebook friend was fake.
"The face changed; it’s now a woman," Cox said of the profile.
FBI Special Agent Kevin Gallagher says the scam is known as pig butchering or crypto confidence fraud.
"So the way this works and why it is so successful is because of the level of sophistication that it has," he said.
The scammer's goal is to butcher a victim’s bank account by making them believe they’re on trusted websites.
"When they’re on that platform, they go to a different website, which actually brings them off-platform, but to them it looks like they’re on a crypto dotcom or something that is trusted," Gallagher said. "Nothing about it is real; it’s money in and money out."
Cox isn’t sure who sent Adult Protection Services to his home, but he’s grateful they did. He knows if it were not for that knock at the door, he may have kept going.
Cox's bank tried to reverse the wire and get his money back, but they were unsuccessful. To make matters worse, Cox had taken out a loan to pay supposed “fees” to his crypto account. Those were fake too.
To make things even more complicated, the FBI told us that some of the scammers themselves are victims of human trafficking who are forced to work in call centers.
So how do we protect ourselves from these types of scams?
- Don’t click on links you're sent. Instead, go directly to the website yourself
- Be skeptical
- Never share personal information with people you’ve only met online
- Ask to meet in person. If they refuse, walk away
Cox wanted to meet his friend, but he kept refusing to do video or audio chats, which is a red flag.
He now has a warning for everyone: "Be careful. You’ve got someone who is basically trying to rob you and they’re doing it with a smile."
