MANTECA – A Manteca mother reached out to CBS13 and the Call Kurtis consumer investigative team after being scammed following something that she saw on her Facebook feed about Bitcoin.
Angelina Diaz was already thinking about Bitcoin when she saw her high school friend post on Facebook about how much money she was making investing in cryptocurrency.
It made Diaz, who lives paycheck to paycheck, think that she should take advantage of this, too, surmising that this could be the next Google or Apple. After all, she had just received a $2,000 bonus at work. She was impressed by her friend’s post, who wrote, “I’m so happy and grateful. Bitcoin mining has made life so easy for me”, as she showed photos of her luxurious new home.
“I’m thinking it’s the next best thing, like everybody else,” she said. “And I’ve never have done anything like that. I’ve never really joined any next-best thing. Things I really don’t. I’m really very conservative and very reserved with investing and whatnot. And, so again, I just wanted to get a jump. This is my chance.”
Diaz, a single mother who raised three daughters, always dreamed of owning her own home. She exchanged messages with her friend, who told her it was legitimate.
“I do rent,” Diaz added. “I’ve been renting for my whole life, so. Yeah. So seeing a house and seeing all your friends at the 40-plus age, you want the same thing.”
Next, she reached out to her friend’s investment manager. She sent $2,000 through Zelle and opened an account with the website Bitgose.com. It was an official-looking website with a live ticker.
Within five hours, Diaz said her Bitcoin investment of $2,000 grew to $100,000.
“And I’m just like, there is no way, because if that was the case, then everybody would be in on it, right?” she said.
Realizing it was fishy, Diaz tried to withdraw her money, but she said they wanted another $3,000. They claimed she would get it back.
We asked Diaz what was going through her mind at the time.
“Well, just that I see it every single day,” she explained. “Every single day.”
The FBI’s Jimmy Hassani said that usually, the value goes up a bit more modestly, from $2,000 to $3,000. Hassani said they may let you withdraw your initial earnings to gain your trust.
“They’ll take a gamble,” Hassani said. “And now the victim realizes, oh, this is not a scam and tries to reinvest. But, when they try to reinvest, there’s a little pop-up on their account that says, you no longer qualify.”
Unless you invest a much larger amount.
The FBI has come up with a name for these types of scams: pig butchering.
“Why pig butchering?” Hassani asked. “It’s an unfortunate title.”
Hassani said scammers use stolen photos to gain your confidence.
The victim or so-called piglet’s trust translates to you investing even more money, until you get slaughtered out of your savings.
And once scammed, you may get filed into a dark web database to get hit again, with someone posing as the “recovery team.”
“And that’s a new set of scammers, that say, ‘hey, we noticed that you’ve lost a bunch of money, we know the FBI can’t help you, but we can,’ ” Hassani said.
For a fee, of course.
The FBI reports that 9,575 Californians fell victim to cryptocurrency scams last year, worth nearly $1.2 billion.
In Diaz’s case – and if you look closer on the Bitcoin website she used to invest – there are some clues that something is off.
We ran the photos of those who purportedly wrote testimonials for the website through a Google Image search and found the same photos actually pop up on quite a few investment sites and with the same exact testimonials – only changing out the name of the site.
The address at the bottom of the website – a Google search finds that it is the same address as New York University’s journalism program.
The school confirmed to CBS13 that no investment business is based there.
Diaz admitted that, before she sent the money through Zelle, the bank put up a warning – but she pushed the button for her money to go through.
“I am embarrassed,” Diaz said. ” Because I knew better. I know better. And I’m supposed to be a professional, you know? And I’m supposed to be a mom. Supposed to be smart. You know, you go to school, you get all the grades and everything, but I don’t know what it was. I honestly don’t know what it was.”
Diaz is not mad at the bank, but she is mad at herself.
“I was targeted, but I allowed myself to be the target,” she said. “They already got my $2,000. To me, with karma, I kind of felt honestly was a universe for me personally. I guess you can kind of say so I kind of felt like, you know what? I should have just gave the money to my mom. Yeah, I mean, somebody who needs it. But, if this was karma for bad negativity that I’ve given or dished out or, you know, that my kids or people, then I kind of felt like I deserved it. So I’m kind of a self-inflicting person. Like if I kind of self-punishment. Right? So I think this was my self-punishment to myself.”
Diaz has since learned that her friend was also scammed.
But, there’s good news for Diaz. She challenged the charge with her bank, which denied her claim. But, she said they worked her case and managed to recover her money.
She wishes she would have spoken with her friend on the phone, instead of just messaging, before she gave her money to the scammers.
