Scam Type
CryptoCurrency Scam
Date Reported
Oct 14, 2022
Victim Postal Code
98029
Total Dollars Lost
$17,000.00
Scam Description
I am reporting this scam which was performed on my father, starting last month. He got a text from a woman named Anna Jin Wang. She was asking her coworker Brian what color dress would make her look good for dinner. My dad answered the text, telling her it was the wrong person but blue was a good color. The conversation went from there and the woman said that it was fate, and then she started sharing her story of being an orphan and that she moved to New York from Singapore. She had a business as a health beautician, and that her aunt, Jennifer Li Wang was an analyst at Goldman Sachs and had a really successful side business in cryptocurrency. I looked these names up and LinkedIn has two profiles for Jennifer Li and Li Wang, both claiming to be an Analyst at GS. The woman, Anna, shared videos of her aunt, pictures of herself, pictures of some of her family members, and told my dad to move to WhatsApp because it was secure platform to communicate. My dad did this, and they continued to have discussions, and video chatted as well. A few days into this, she started talking about him getting into bitcoin and that he could make money doing this. He had shared some personal information about the family, actually a lot of information about the family, birthdates, names, places of past and present residence, grandchildren’s names and ages including pictures. He shared pictures of most of us. The woman Anna used this information to continue to convince him that he needed to support his family and the best way to do this was the cryptocurrency. He told her that he had a pension and it was a significant amount. I don’t want to give the details of this directly but it was a lot. The conversation with this woman Anna became very focused on his money. She told him to take out $100,000 and put it into cryptocurrency. She had him download three different apps and he sent his drivers license to her, and a picture of his face for facial recognition on the apps that she provided. She had him working through DeFi, Cashapp, and Coinbase. She said she would take a commission from what he made. His first investment was $1000, in which she showed him that he earned $400 from that in just seconds. My dad said it was absolutely amazing and wanted to invest more. A few days later he invested $7000, and then a few days after that this woman convinced him to try to pull out $100,000 from his account and told him to not tell his family. His bank would not let him do this, but they allowed him to wire $10,000. So this is what he put in next. At this point I found out about it and told him this was a scam. He realizes at this point that he was scammed, he cannot take his 17,000 out. He asked for the woman’s drivers license and she was upset with him and said it was invasion of privacy. After this he stoped talking to her, fully convinced that this was a scam. I am reporting this to the Better Business Bureau because my father does not know what to do right now. Our biggest concern is not the money that he lost, but it is the amount of personal information that he shared of himself and all of his children and grandchildren to this scam organization. I was able to save the conversations from the WhatsApp as a zip file and plan on reporting this to the FBI next. This woman, Anna, used several different phone numbers to contact my dad. Even after we blocked her, she used two other phone numbers within a minute to try to reach him. Interestingly, one of the phone numbers had location services on and showed that it was based in New York. I do not believe that this was true, because who would do that?
