PROVO, Utah, Dec. 14, 2023 (Gephardt Daily) — The Utah County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the defrauding of two residents of more than $28,000 total in scams involving cryptocurrency, high-tech deception and old-fashioned blackmail.
Investigators with the sheriff’s office have recently taken reports from two different people who were victimized in similar cryptocurrency fraud schemes, the agency said in a Thursday evening press release on social media.
Both victims received emails detailing purchases they purportedly agreed to make using their PayPal accounts. Both victims had not authorized the transactions and were asked to call a number to resolve the problems.
One victim was told they had purchased $15,000 worth of child pornography online. The suspect told the victim the problem could be solved with a $15,000 payment in cryptocurrency to the suspect.
“There was a bit of blackmail involved,” Sgt. Garrett Dutson, public information officer with the sheriff’s office, told Gephardt Daily. “The victim knew no child porn had been purchased, but went along with it because the suspect hinted at reporting the circumstances to law enforcement. The victim wanted to avoid any public embarrassment.”
In the other case the victim was told their problem could be resolved by downloading a secondary app to his phone called “Any Desk” that would help correct the problem. What the app did instead was take total control of the victim’s phone.
The suspect then used the victim’s cryptocurrency account to transfer more than $13,000 to an external account.
“Cryptocurrency is hard to track,” Dutson said. “Apparently you can follow the bitcoin, or whichever type it is, but identifying the holders of the accounts it flows through is very difficult.”
The sheriff’s office offers the following tips to avoid such scams:
-It is ALWAYS ok to tell a person you are going to verify the information yourself and then hang up.
-Closely watch for unfamiliar transactions on credit/debit cards and in bank accounts.
-Closely check sender email addresses to insure they are legitimate.
-Avoid clicking on links in emails or calling numbers in those emails if you are not familiar with them.
-Cryptocurrency scams are very difficult for investigators to trace to their source.
To report a crime like this call your local law enforcement agency.
