Senior Citizen Loses Over $700K in Crypto Investment Scam, Blames Bank for Failing to Protect Her
Technology is changing the way we look at banking, investments, and finances. As new trends emerge on social media, scammers find more ways of online fraud. Bank scams are not just limited to stealing personal or banking information. The scammers are luring the victims to invest, causing them a huge financial loss. Middle-class people often make the mistake of investing all their life savings, and if they are scammed, they are left with nothing. Senior citizens are most vulnerable to such scams and one such scam happened with an old lady who indulged herself into crypto investments and ended up losing $700K. Let's delve into the details of the scam story and whether she got her money back.
An 80-year-old widowed Taiwanese immigrant, Alice Lin shared her story on how she lost almost all her savings in the CryptoRom scams and held the Chase Bank authorities responsible for not even notifying her, per CBS News. She was already struggling to pay her bills and save for her retirement when she received an unexpected message on WeChat. The man lured her by talking to her nicely and offered to teach her about several investment options. Some days later, he convinced her to download a crypto trading app and invest all her savings and retirement funds into the currencies. Lin sat back and relaxed, thinking it was an actual investment that would secure her old age.
Lin got associated with the scammer in 2022 and further shared how the scammer talked to her regularly, just to win her confidence. The man taught Lin about how to invest and send money to others. The results were shocking as the app turned out to be a sham and Lin ended up sending $720,000 to that man who never again talked to her after receiving the money. That was the moment when she realized that she had been scammed.
After losing all her hard-earned life savings, she decided to sue the bank. She said, "Only if they had done a little something to protect elders like me from being scammed, I wouldn't be where I am now. An 80-year-old widow left to pick up the pieces of my life." As per the details of the filed lawsuit, the woman did not have much money in her account but was spending thousands of dollars through her investment account. Lin said that nobody from Chase Bank came up to her or even messaged her saying, "Hey, you know, maybe this is a little bit concerning that your banking transaction is completely different than your normal behavior." To her surprise, her daughter who was the joint owner of the account was also not warned about such unsolicited transactions.
A Chase Bank spokesperson revealed something opposite to KCAL News saying that they did their part and even the manager asked questions to Lin before doing such huge wire transfers. They also said that she was warned before the big transactions and told that she might be unable to recover the money in the event of fraud. According to the bank, she had also read a warning on how to protect oneself from scams. As per the FBI, Americans have lost over $3 billion falling victim to such bank and other online scams in 2022.