Sacramento County woman loses $100K in cryptocurrency scam

By Andres Valle

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    ANTELOPE, California (KCRA) — A woman from Sacramento County says she was scammed out of $100,000 from a cryptocurrency scam.

The woman, who only wants to be identified as Leah, said the scam lasted for several months as a person claiming to be an investor gained her trust, encouraging her to invest in cryptocurrency.

“I mean, this is like my whole life savings that I lost,” said Leah.

Leah exclusively spoke to KCRA 3 about how she lost her money. She was emotional, crying several times during the interview.

“My family doesn’t even know of what happened,” said Leah.

Leah said she connected with the person who would eventually steal her money through LinkedIn. She said the person described himself as an investor with ties to China.

“He reached out to me and was talking about investing. So being the age that I am, I was interested,” said Leah.

Leah said he would message her through a business account on LinkedIn and ultimately would move the conversations to the instant messaging platform WhatsApp.

The conversations started in the summer of 2023. She said he slowly gained her trust for months, until he convinced her to deposit a large amount of money into a cryptocurrency account she owned.

He then had her transfer the funds to what she thought would be an investment.

“He was guiding me through the crypto and making deposits in my electronic wallet. The address that he gave me must have been for his wallet because it went somewhere,” said Leah.

Her account instantly drained. The man then blocked her on all social media platforms. Leah said she immediately went to law enforcement after she realized what happened.

At that point, she no longer had access to his profile.

“We’ll call these criminals all kinds of names, but stupid is not one. They are very creative. They’re smart and they’re manipulative,” said Sgt. Amar Gandhi, a spokesperson for the the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.

The department says crimes like these are extremely hard for victims to get any of their money back. Their department works with multiple state and federal agencies to try to track cyber crimes, but ultimately, it’s too much for them to handle.

“Once that money leaves your account, especially via wire, especially via crypto. Crypto was designed to again be very untraceable, and that’s again, its strength. And then it’s the weakness if you didn’t mean to let that money go,” said Gandhi.

The FBI said that in 2023, there was over $5.6 billion lost in cryptocurrency scams.

Local authorities encourage any victims to always report scams.

Leah has not gotten any money back.

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