Nova Scotia woman scammed for $10,000 after being convinced to deposit money in Bitcoin terminal

A Kentville woman can’t believe she fell for a phone scam that cost her $10,000.

“I’m still trying to recover from being so embarrassed about it happening in the first place,” she said.  

“I’m totally stunned over how it went down.” 

The woman, who is in her 80s, didn’t want to be identified to protect herself from being targeted again, but she said she wants to make others aware of the techniques scam artists employ. 

“If in any way it would help somebody else by reading about this, I want to (talk).” 

She said she knows older people are targeted for scams.

“I always thought I was fairly aware about things, but just the way this went down, they got me. Totally. One hundred per cent.” 

It started as a coincidence, the woman said. She was never one to do online shopping until recently but depended on her daughter to order things for her. 

“She does it all the time so I never bothered, but I was here by myself and said, ‘This is stupid, why don’t I just go do it, it’s no big deal.’” 

She ordered items from a vendor in the United States. 

“While I was waiting for that to arrive and clear customs, that’s when this guy called me on the phone,” she said. “There were two of them. The first one was very short (in manners).” 

The man said her order led to her bank card being compromised and it was traced to an address in Texas, where someone used her card to purchase items that were seized. The items included drugs, passports and guns being shipped out of the U.S. into Canada, and they said she was accused of money laundering.  

“That really frightened me,” she said.  

She thought those items had been slipped into the package she was expecting. 

They told her it was a police matter, “and they were trying to fix it and save me from losing more money.” 

The man told her he would connect her with an investigator, and another man got on the phone who said he was from CSIS. 

“I think that was the part that convinced me so much. He was very kind and concerned and sympathetic,” the woman said. 

That man told her to get money out of her account and into a safe place, directing her to a bitcoin machine at a store in town. She went to the bank and withdrew $5,000, the maximum she could, and then went to the bitcoin machine to deposit the money. The man stayed on the phone the entire time, limiting her ability to talk to someone else, and walked her through the process of using an account number to deposit the money. He told her that putting it there would prevent more fraudulent purchases from being made on her card. 

Depositing that much money a few bills at a time meant the woman was slightly hunched over, making her back sore. When she said so, the scammer suggested she go home and get a rest, then called her back in the afternoon after she napped. 

He kept her on the phone again and she went to another branch of her bank and withdrew another $5,000 and repeated the process. This time, though, the activity raised the suspicion of a clerk at the store, who called police. When an officer arrived and talked to her, she refused to believe she had been scammed. 

The next day, another officer was at her home, but she still wasn’t believing she was being taken advantage of.

Then the man called back looking for more money. The officer motioned for her to put the phone on speaker and listened as she said she called the police.  

The man told her he was working with police, and when she asked to speak to a local officer she was called by a third scammer. He gave her a name and rank, and the number that appeared on her phone display was local. 

The number was spoofed. The name wasn’t real and neither was the rank, the actual Kentville officer told her, and the call ended. 

It was then she knew for sure she had been taken. 

The woman said she’s not rich but “can tolerate” the lost money. However, it was cash she had earmarked to help her granddaughter with university expenses. 

She said her advice to anyone getting calls from people that involve sending money to solve a problem is “don’t act immediately. Think it over and go to the police and report rather than believe what the guy says. When you’re scared and in shock, it takes a little while to get over that and think clearly.” 

It still bothers her she was duped. 

“I can’t even believe it yet, how firmly I believed him and how well he played the role. It wasn’t until the very end when there was no doubt left.” 

The items she ordered arrived, and she thinks it was just a coincidence she received the scam call. She doesn’t think she would have fallen for it if she hadn’t made the order. 

The bitcoin machine had also just recently been installed at the store. 

Kentville police are investigating, Chief Martin Smith said, but tracking money sent through a bitcoin machine is difficult, even more so if the deposit is $5,000 or less. 

He said there are five bitcoin machines in the Annapolis Valley, more than 50 in the Halifax area and others across the province.  

Smith said staff at the store said they had seen people using the machine while they were on phones, and he suspects there are other victims who are too embarrassed to come forward or who don’t yet realize they’ve been scammed. 

The machine has warning signs about how to avoid being scammed, but criminals keep victims distracted so they either ignore or don’t notice the signs. 

“No one should ever ask you to take money out of your bank and do that, and no government agency, for sure,” Smith said.