The Expert Podcast

One of the questions we get very frequently is: Do Ponzi scheme online scammers get caught? Do these people ever get caught, or do they always get away with scamming you out of money? Whether it's a pig butchering scheme, a crypto scheme, a fake Bond scheme—there are dozens of them out there. Some of them are these employment-level schemes where you have to pay money to get more income or more revenue from doing processing work. And the answer is, yeah, people get caught all the time. Here's an article about a hundred million-dollar scam that was caught, busted, prosecuted, and people are starting to get their money back.

So, what do you do to make sure that you're one of the ones who gets money back? Well, first of all, you have to take action. You can't pretend it didn't happen. You can't stay quiet. You can't just let the person get away with it. Because many times, the reason scammers keep going with these schemes is because they count on victims being too embarrassed sometimes, or too hesitant to go ahead with taking action against the scammer.

What do you have to do? First thing is to make sure that you protect future losses. Make sure you don’t have any access to money that they can still get. Do they have logins for your bank account? Do they have a way to transfer money or do wire transfers? Do they have access to your crypto wallet? Make sure you shut all that down. Also, keep in contact with the scammer, but don't send any more money. Be aware that they're going to use very sophisticated psychological techniques to try to get you to send more money. They're going to threaten you, saying, "If you don't send this fee, you'll lose all your money," or "If you pay this money, you'll double your account." They're going to use greed and fear—greed and fear—to get you to send more money, which is probably how they got you to send money in the first place: greed to make big profits and fear to not lose what you already sent.

They're going to do that again. They have highly trained psychologists and psychiatrists on their staff to craft words and to very carefully tell you things that make you want to send more money. So, make sure if you're going to stay in contact with them, that you don't fall victim or you're not tempted to do that.

Next, you want to do three things. First, file a notice with the IC3, which is part of the FBI—a scam tracking division of the FBI. Now, don't get a false sense of security that just by doing that, the FBI is going to drop all their cases and work on your fraud case. That's not how it works. They want to see how many people were victims of that same scammer. You put yours in, all the other victims will put theirs in, and eventually, if it accumulates to a high enough profile or if that scammer does something else wrong—because many times these scammers are not just running this scam, they're doing other things which are illegal—and sometimes those pop up on the radar screen of law enforcement. But you want to get your name in there so that when there is, or if there is, some prosecution or some enforcement by the government, you are established as a victim, so when they start getting money back, you get money back.

Number two is you want to file a notice with your district attorney or your attorney general in your state. Now, it's going to be very difficult to do. Many times, these offices don't want to take these kinds of cases. They consider it a civil matter. They consider it really just a business dispute—you lost money, and the other side is saying it was an investment. They're not going to take the case, but one way you can have a higher probability of them looking at it is if you do it by mail. If you try to call them up or walk in the door and say, "I want to file something," they may talk you out of it, but if you find the actual filing form or you determine what language is needed to submit a complaint, send it by mail to the office of your attorney general or the district attorney. Now they have to put it in their system. Again, they're not going to drop everything and take action on it immediately, but at least now they know about it. They're aware of it.

The third thing you might want to try to do is file a police report with your local law enforcement, your county sheriff, or police department. Again, they're not going to want to take this report because they're going to consider it a financial civil matter and not look at the crime behind it. They may not think they have jurisdiction if the other party is outside of the area, but at least you want to make an attempt. Again, doing it by mail is a good way to do it. Even if you send it by mail and they return it back saying, "We can't take this," you have documentation that you filed it or tried to file it.

Next, you want to look at cases where recovery has been done. Here's one article on the screen about a court-appointed receiver who has recovered 30 million of the roughly 125 million people lost. It starts with the word "so far." In this case, it happened to be in Utah. The court has already recovered about a quarter—30 out of 125. That's about 25%, a quarter of the money—and they're still working on it. So far, you want to look at these cases where money has been recovered and see what the common elements are in those cases. Look at Bernie Madoff, look at Scott Rosin, look at current cases where scammers are getting caught, and money's coming back. Those are the ones that will give you clues about what to do.

Part of it many times is doing your own investigation so you can hand evidence and records to the enforcement agencies on a silver platter. Many times, the agencies that would work on investigating these cases don't want to work on it because they don't know if they're going to find anything. They don't know if it's real. They don't know if you're just a disgruntled customer trying to make noise and complain about a company that basically did everything right. They don't know it's a scam, but they don't know it's a scam. So, if you do some investigation on your own—maybe doing an asset search, maybe doing activity searches—and our website will give you some instructions on how to do that, you may be able to prime the pump and get them motivated because they can see, "Oh yeah, there's something here. This person already did some work."

In fact, we now have on our website, activeintel.com or actualhuman.com (either one), where you can actually schedule a live one-on-one consultation with a licensed private investigator to hear your story, tell us about your case, show us your documents, show us your text messages so we can see what's there and advise you on what can be done to gather evidence to show a good case or what can be done on your behalf by an investigator.

Either way, what you want to do is take action. Either way, you want to get information to the government so they can start looking at this case to see how they can help you. Whether you do it yourself or have somebody do it for you, finding the identity of the scammer, tracking the activity, documenting all the transfer of funds, doing an asset search—the more of that you can get done, the more likely the government is to look at it.

So, scams aren't a lost cause. You'll see on our YouTube channel all the time we have stories where scammers are caught. Some of them we've worked on the cases and we know how it works internally for the authorities to bust these people, get the money, get it returned to victims, and sometimes victims get back all their money. It may take a while, but the faster you start, the faster you'll have a chance of getting back some of your recovered funds. If you liked this video, be sure to click on a few others on our channel to see if there's other information that might be helpful to you about this same subject, or maybe even other related subjects that could assist you with your resolution of your issue.