One thing I’ve learned as I’ve progressed through life is that having an education is not necessarily an indication of intelligence. Even when that education leads to a high-paying and generally respected career. This is one such case.
This time last year I found myself in a financial bind. I’m 65 and work as a GP in Manchester. I’d had an unexpectedly high tax bill of £30,000 and my wife and I also wanted to fix the roof and convert the attic.
Well, yes, that can happen. It’s a mistake I made one year when I was so busy that I failed to notice that I was creeping into the next tax band. I didn’t do that again. I had to suck it up and find the money, even though it meant things being a bit tight for a short period. The cash put aside hadn’t been enough. My fault, and I own it entirely. However…
So I chatted to a few friends who had made money from cryptocurrency trading, specifically from what they called ‘crypto arbitrage’.
I learnt that this is a kind of futures trading, where a trader buys crypto coins from one cryptocurrency exchange on the understanding they will sell them at a higher price on another exchange. Friends warned me that it was not something to try to do myself but to find an investor to do for me.
Okay, so far, so good. Personally, I tend to avoid schemes where I know nothing as it is too easy to get it wrong or get scammed…
The money landed in my Revolut account, so all seemed legitimate. I put in another £1,000 and within two or three days, my balance was about £15,000, which was incredible.
Ethan would often text, asking me to call him via WhatsApp when I had a break, but mostly we would speak in the evenings, chatting three or four hours a week about the crypto market. Ethan was my main contact.
There was also a man called Oscar who updated me. One day I had a call from a man at the firm I’d never spoken to before called Jason, and he recommended that I buy the crypto coin Ethereum. I decided to go for it and transferred £5,000 into crypto via my Revolut account then into my wallet on the website.
Jason rang again a week later and recommended another coin – Solana – so I dipped into my Isas and gave them a little bit more for that. And then somebody else called Helen from Wiseway Investments called to say Nvidia stocks were doing well… on and on it went.
Each time I transferred cash from my Revolut account into my cryptocurrency account through an online banking transfer. I was transferring so much that Revolut delayed payments.
Every time I tried to transfer to crypto I was given a warning that this could be a scam and was asked to answer questions about what the transfer was for.
And you, dear reader, know what is coming next, don’t you? Oh, yes, it was indeed a scam. The general approach to this sort of thing is, if it looks too good to be true, it usually is.
Ethan had told me to say that I was paying for a service and told me that the banks were issuing warnings as they were worried crypto companies were taking business from them. It made sense, so I always proceeded.
Yes, believe the person you’ve never met who phoned you out of the blue over the warnings from your bank. Sounds sensible, doesn’t it?
I’d invested £30,000, taking money from my pension and my savings and my account showed the value of my investments was £57,000. That’s what I needed to cover my expenses so I told Ethan I wanted to take my money out. I’d been investing for just over three months.
‘Ethan’ or whoever he was, had already pocketed that money and stashed it away somewhere.
Ethan said I had to pay 10 per cent of what I held in my account to get the money out as an admin fee.
You’ve got to hand it to Ethan, he’s milking the cow for as much as it will give.
But by the time I’d paid £6,000 the value of my stocks had gone up, so he told me I needed to give them another £1,000. This happened at least three more times.
Three more fucking times? For fuck’s sake. I sometimes think these people need to be taken for all they are worth as a lesson in not being so fucking stupid.
By now I was getting annoyed.
Oh, really?
Doubts were starting to creep in, but I had so much invested I didn’t want to face the reality that it might all have been a lie.
Only now? Only after you’ve been fleeced for thousands, it is starting to dawn. An intelligent person would have picked up on it before investing a penny. An intelligent person would have been more thorough in their initial research and used an organisation that was genuine with a reputable record.
I told Ethan outright: ‘I’m fed-up with this and want to close my account.’
He told me that to do that I had to pay an admin fee of £1,500. Again, I paid. Then I was told I had to pay tax – £2,000 – on my profit. That allayed my fears.
Facepalm.
I thought if Wiseway was sorting out tax, then this had to be a reputable firm. So I paid that, and asked them to send a tax receipt for my tax return. That was on a Friday. The tax receipt hadn’t arrived by Monday. That was the first time I felt really anxious.
Beyond all help.
This went on for two weeks, taking us well into August. But by now I was scared. I spoke to a manager, who told me he would transfer my money into cryptocurrency, instead of a standard bank account – blaming my bank for not putting it through in sterling.
Ethan said I would need to send a ‘mirror payment’ of 10 per cent into a bitcoin wallet to get my cash. That was £15,000 and it took me two or three days to pay that through Revolut.
By this time, Revolut was not letting me send large amounts of money, so I had to send it in two separate payments. By now they said my account was worth £250,000, and this chap called Alex told me he would send it to me if I gave him a big tip.He said ‘this is the sort of thing I would do for $10,000’, so I said ‘look, if I get that money out you can have $10,000, but I’m not paying that until it’s in my account.’
They said I could withdraw it if I paid 10 per cent – about £25,000 – but Revolut would not let me send any more money, and neither would Kroo, my other online bank.
I was able to send two payments of £10,000 via another account I had, with Monzo, but they blocked the third payment, which the scammers said had risen to another £10,000 because of a rise in the value of Bitcoin.
So he sent them even more money. Seriously, there is no helping some people.
They told me that my investment was now meant to be worth £400,000. I yelled that I didn’t have another £40,000 to give them and demanded my money back.
By the end of that week, in September, nothing had come. I had to face the awful fact: I had been scammed. It was hard to take in.
An intelligent person would have worked it out a long time ago.
I knew I had to tell Mary. Her reaction was worse than I’d feared. She went nuclear and it was World War Three. I told her why I’d started investing, but she accused me of getting involved with crypto because I was greedy. She said she could never forgive me.
I’m with Mary on this. Scammers get away with it for two reasons – stupidity and greed. Okay, there are some who are vulnerable such as the very old who are targeted with fear, but for the most part, it’s stupidity and greed and that is what we have here.
Sympathy? Nope.
I received a phone call at the beginning of November from a nice woman called Jane who had an Eastern European accent but said she lived in the UK. Good news, she told me: ‘We have managed to recover your money.’
We chatted and she told me I needed to give her 10 per cent to recover the funds. Of course it should have rung alarm bells but I was deaf to any warning signs. At this point I didn’t have any bank accounts that would let me transfer money to crypto.
Since I had reported the fraud, my bank accounts had been frozen. Jane told me I could send money directly to her and she would transfer it to crypto for me – as the bank, she said, was not letting me receive cash in sterling.
She persuaded me to download something called Any Desk which allowed her access – and control – of my bank accounts, so that she could check it was all working fine. It’s one of the biggest regrets of my life. All was well until I checked my accounts a day later and every last penny was gone.
I had lost another £50,000.
I have no words. Seriously. Having been taken for £150k he gives the buggers a further £50k. What the flying fuck?
All my accounts had been frozen. Mary had to dip into her savings just so we could buy food. It was then she told me that our marriage was over and she wanted a divorce.
Mary is based.
I used to watch BBC’s Scam Interceptors and think the frauds they warned viewers about were obvious. When I tell my own story, it’s so obvious with hindsight. But when it was happening, it was not. I am a trusting man – but not a stupid one.
And I am only sharing my story so that others can learn from my mistakes. This kind of fraud can happen to anyone.
No. You were stupid. So stupid, that when they came back for further bites of the pie, you gave them what they wanted. It couldn’t happen to ‘anyone’ only those stupid and greedy enough to dismiss the warning signs.
If I talked to my friends about how to deal with an unexpected tax bill I don’t think they’d suggest crypto arbitrage trading. I don’t really believe this bit.
I’d probably bet that he’d heard of people making loads of money with crypto and wanted to have a go, despite knowing nothing about it. And not just knowing nothing about it, not having bothered to find out how to go about it and what the risks are.
Given this GP’s gullibility I suppose it explains why so many allegedly ‘intelligent and educated’ people in the NHS insist women can have a penis
Well, yes, which is why I do my best to avoid them. None too successfully lately. They keep badgering me to come in due to prescriptions.
I’ve done it too – the tax slip-up not the getting scammed. If you get a local accountant, they will contact the taxman for you. (NEVER contact the tax people yourself.) They’ll say Mr Bloggs cannot pay his tax just now but this is a suggested plan of repayment over a year or three. Prattling will ensue, the accountant will remain silent until it is over and then they’ll say “OK”. Cost? £500 and a bit of interest.
My accountant did a deal. As it was, I had to return to the UK as that contract came to a sudden end, and the HMRC ended up owing me money.
I can’t access the article, and can’t bothered in any case as you’ve posted what are presumably the major points.
Yes scams, yes gullible, stupid and greedy people.
I’m probably overthinking this, but it sounds like a frightener piece to deter people from moving funds outside of the UK and ‘the system’ and into something THEM can’t control. It wouldn’t surprise me to find articles detailing “I moved my pensions and trusts of £4m into a Swiss bank and now it’s been frozen”, although that would more likely be in a publication more widely read by the sort of people with those assets than the Wail.
Possibly. But this appears to be what it says on the tin – a fool and his money.
Hell the alarm bells and red flags were everywhere. But then, I know someone who used to spend sixty quid a month on a lottery syndicate. Not actually a scam*, but by the time he decided that he couldn’t afford to keep it up he had spent about six grand. Six grand that he would still have if he had put it in an ISA or something instead. Greed makes people daft.
*Unless you classify the lottery itself as a scam. Technically it’s not because the stake, the prize money and the odds are known when you buy your ticket. In practice it scams people who don’t really understand how remote their chances of winning actually is.
Sixty quid a month is steep. A few bob on the off chance, maybe, but that’s just daft.
I used to hear the ads for the Euro-Millions Lottery on the radio at work. Sometimes the jackpot would get up to 150 million pounds or something like that. Occasionally I would buy a ticket, £2 if I remember correctly, money that I wouldn’t miss, and although the chances are close to zero, someone always wins it eventually.
If people pop a small amount into it on the grounds that for a few days, it gives them a little bit of happiness in anticipation, then no harm is done.
Dad used to work for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau (1980’s, early 90s), part time as a volunteer manager and advisor. On a weekly basis he would see clients who weren’t the sharpest and when asked “How will you pay these debts you have run up?”, they would respond with (one of):
“My bank account has no money, so I’m going to open another one”
“Borrow money from ……”
“Win the lottery” being the pertinent one I remember. Dad tried and failed to explain the chances of them winning, even with buying many (dozens) of the £1 tickets. He used to teach Msc Advanced Maths, so was well equipped to do this, but instead used the simpler method of pointing to his own ticket pinned to the wall with the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6. “No chance”, they would scoff, and he would demonstrate that the chances were the same.
It did little to stem the flow of the poor and woeful.
I agree that as harmless entertainment it’s fine, a bit like planning a day at the races or a night at the casino (opera, if you’re a Marx Brothers fan) and budgeting accordingly. If you win, it pays for the event. But many people don’t or can’t think that way, especially when desperation has the reins.
An erstwhile colleague used to go to the races. He would have a small budget for bets and stop when it ran out. Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost and sometimes broke even. He looked at the losses as just the cost of a fun day out.
This sounds a lot like what is generally known as “pig butchering”, but minus the dating app element.
Makes me wonder if the account has been sanitised to appear (yes I know it sounds surreal) less embarrassing (!!) than it actually was.
I was reading thinking “when is this titanic bell end going to twig”.
High intelligence and high gullibility go together more often than is imagined, but to SO completely and effectively suppress all instinct for self preservation?
If I had to put crypto on it, I’d suspect there would have to be the promise of a bit of exotic poontang in there somewhere!
Some nine years ago now, I was at a careers fair for the NHS with my lad. It first became apparent that to study Medicine, qualification requirements are lower than to study any single science. Typically AAA for Medicine and A*AA or even A*A*A for Physics or Chemistry. The academic registrar at one of the major Russell Group medical schools was there. He said ‘we aren’t interested in your qualifications. We want to know if you’ve volunteered in a nursing home’. All around us was murmuring. I listened in ‘uncle Ahmed has a nursing home, he’ll say you’ve been working there’ was the gist of the murmuring. So, unbiased intellectual qualifications are now routinely ignored for easily-forgeable ‘work experience’. One kid we know was offered a place by saying he lived in a fairly downmarket area. He actually lives in the footballer-belt part of Cheshire, but has a relative in the down-market area who registered him on the voters’ roll there. Again, easily-forgeable advantage obtained over impartial hard work.
Two consultant surgeons were next to speak. After an introduction stressing how they were there to serve, and not for money, they spent their entire speech stressing that they worked two- or three- day weeks, and that one had left a job because they wanted him to work a five day week. They actually spoke incessantly about obtaining the most money, most benefits, and shortest hours, so belying the claims made in their introduction. An MD takes 5 years to obtain.
My lad asked to leave the meeting about 2/3 through. He went to Oxford, studied NatSci (Physics) and is now a Doctor of Physics which takes seven years.
To be a medical Doctor is now a second-rate scientific qualification. The finest minds do not go into the profession. As we can see from your example – and all their unprincipled, money-grubbing behaviour during and since Covid.
“They actually spoke incessantly about obtaining the most money, most benefits, and shortest hours, so belying the claims made in their introduction. An MD takes 5 years to obtain.”
I wish I had known that was the way medicine works I would have become a doctor.
It was the money-grubbing and blatant nepotism, gaming the system openly but trumpeting each and every leftist shibboleth.
Very hard to stomach – but now we have empty surgeries, nurses the only medical staff ever to be seen (even for cancer diagnosis at my excuse for a surgery), and doctors who use every new pay settlement to hire more locums and more nurse-practitioners.
At my GP, you cannot get an appointment for 14 days, no GP works more than a two-day week, and I popped in a form requiring only a GP signature, with an SAE, to be told it would take 4 weeks. It actually took almost seven.
Yet anything carrying a government bonus for the GP is available instantly. And we are badgered for it weekly.
You can tell what sort of people doctors are by how they tell you what they do. They* get all haughty, puffing out their chests and “ooh, I’m a doctor, dontcha know!”, then wait for admiration.
Meanwhile, those of us with real jobs are more like “yeah, I’m a spanner jockey. Who cares.”
There are stories like the OP in the Sunday Telegraph practically every week, and amazingly the people running the Agony Aunt column are invariably sympathetic. There’s usually a sob factor (their dog just died or something) but it’s actually unbelievable what people will fall for.
Internet romances are a common one (“I thought he loved me so I sent him my life savings even though we’d never met”, etc etc).
As our host says, they deserve to be taken for the lot.