An Australian man is speaking out after a group of online scammers coaxed him into giving away $80,000.
Oliver*, from northern Queensland, lost his fortune to a fake cryptocurrency platform called IBC Exchange.
News.com.au knows of one other Australian couple who were scammed out of $70,000 from the same outfit.
For Oliver, his nightmare began when his adult daughter mentioned she was using an investment platform to grow her wealth and was periodically putting money into her account.
Interested in doing something similar, Oliver looked around and came across a Google advert for IBC Exchange.
From there, he registered his interest and was manipulated into transferring tens of thousands of dollars.
“The sophistication was beyond belief,” he told news.com.au. “The technology and layers of fraud they used was just incredible.”
They created website portals complete with logins and a real-time dashboard of the stock market and even paid him monthly dividends to convince him they were the real deal.
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Oliver remembers how “a well spoken English guy” called Richard Gibson, supposedly a funds manager, created an account for him.
He had to show 100 points of identification to get his login details.
Oliver had about US$23,000 in cryptocurrency which he transferred into his IBC account.
US and Australian stocks were traded and he could view the stock market in real time — or so he thought.
He was told he couldn’t withdraw his funds for four months, similar to a term deposit, to give it time to accrue gains.
So from June until September he watched his investment rapidly grow. Every month he was paid a dividend of $700.
“The thing was growing very well,” he said.
“We’d speak together two to four times a week, we’d message over WhatsApp and Signal.”
His initial US$23,000 ballooned to US$67,000.
After the four months was up and it was time to redeem his investment in full, that was when “sh*t really started to hit the fan”, according to Oliver.
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After the investment had matured, Oliver looked to cash out, but this proved easier said than done.
There were a number of fees due before he could access the funds.
It took him a few days to get around to it and by then, his investment had increased even more, to US$103,000.
Because the fees he had to pay were a percentage of the investment, that meant the fees doubled over the space of a few days.
“The way they got me on the hook was by the time it needed to be redeemed it had almost doubled, you then had to stump up.”
He forked out US$35,000 to the scammers but there were still many more hoops to jump through.
“Then they said to me ‘how would you like your money? We can give your money either in Australian dollars or crypto’.
“They had to convert it from crypto to Australian dollars, there was another fee for that.”
Now they tried to charge him US$28,000 for the conversion fee, and that was when Oliver started to realise something was amiss.
“By this time I’m realising I’ve got this hook in my lip, it ain’t coming out,” he recalled. “There were so many red flags that I missed, I’m an idiot.”
IBC Exchange told Oliver they were using an intermediary at a crypto trading firm called Gemini to convert his cash.
Suspicious about the massive conversion fees, he decided to contact Gemini direct. Here he learned the name of the intermediary he’d been given was not a real employee at Gemini.
Sensing his doubt, IBC employees started trying to pressure him to pay up, saying he had 48 hours to hand over the money or his account would disappear.
By this point his investment was sitting at US$200,0000
To get them off his back, Oliver pretended he had no money left, saying he had borrowed some of the previous cash from his children.
However, they still continue to email him with new floats and stock options.
*Name withheld over privacy concerns
alex.turner-cohen@news.com.au