The Expert Podcast

Well, if you're watching this video, it's probably already too late to avoid a fraud. You have probably already been scammed out of some money for some type of fake investment. Maybe it's crypto, maybe it's real estate, or maybe some other type of Ponzi scheme. And the way these schemes work is almost exactly the same from case to case. Let me play your scenario, and we'll talk about the recovery of funds. We'll talk about what to do after you're scammed to try to prevent further losses and maybe get some of your money back, what to do, and what not to do. But first of all, let's see if this sounds familiar.

The way that these scams normally work is that you may come across someone on social media, maybe a dating site, maybe on Facebook, maybe on Instagram, maybe on WhatsApp, a person who communicates with you not about any investment, not about money. It's usually a social conversation, a friendship, or a dating arrangement. Maybe it's some group of people that have similar interests, and conversations go on at a social level for a relatively long period of time. It could be days, weeks, or sometimes even months where they'll just talk to you and maybe share pictures with you. They'll share conversations with you, and they'll talk to you over and over. And at some point, usually after a few weeks or a few months, this person will make mention of some large profit they've made themselves through an investment. Maybe it's "I made money on crypto." I had this big deal happen, and I made a big profit. Sometimes this news will come with some photos of them enjoying spending money. Maybe they're on vacation, maybe they're at a nice dinner, or maybe they bought a new car. And they'll show pictures of this affluent purchase, this materialistic purchase. And usually, it's not about trying to get you to invest. It's about "Hey, hey, congratulate me for the money I made, just to let you know I made this profit," and they want you to ask more about it. "Hey, how'd you do it?" And they'll go through a little bit more of a conversation, not right away trying to spring the trap on you. They're very clever about this. And at some point, they'll recommend, "Well, this is where I made the money; it's this platform, this trading website, this investor guy, whatever it is," and they'll refer you to somebody else. It's not them that's taking the money; it's a referral to somebody else.

Now, if you've been scammed, don't feel bad because many, many people fall for this. It's not that you did anything wrong; it's not that you're not sophisticated. These people are very clever; they know how to tug on your heartstrings, they know how to tug on your emotions, and they know how to manipulate you using different wording that you might not expect to trigger you. We're going to talk about some of these red flags here in a minute and how these people are successful in taking your money.

And after you agree to participate in this investment, they'll only ask for a very small amount of money, which could be a couple hundred or maybe a thousand, and they'll ask for a small amount to make it easy to get your foot in the door. They just want to get you to send some money; it doesn't matter how much it is. This isn't really where they're going to make their profit. So you send them 500, a thousand, whatever it is, and sure enough, instantly they're going to show you a statement on your login that you have a big profit. You sent them 400; now you have $920; or you sent them 1,000; now you have $1,800, whatever it is. So you see, "Hey, I made a lot of money," and then they'll ask for more. "Well, put in another 2,000, put in another 5,000," and they'll show more profits, and they'll keep doing this, escalating the amount they get, using different types of asks. It might be, "Hey, if you hit this $20,000 level in your account, you automatically get doubled," and they'll talk about things like double income guaranteed. Anytime you hear guaranteed profit, that's a red flag. And it'll keep escalating until they sense that you're starting to hesitate. When your messages take too long to reply, maybe you're not very quickly giving money anymore, and then they'll spring another trap on you. They'll say, "Well, you owe some taxes; you owe an accounting fee; there's an audit fee; there's some other fee that you have to pay." Sometimes they'll even offer to loan you some of the money. They'll say, "Look, your audit fee is $4,000, but I'll kick in 2,000 of my own money, so you only have to pay 2,000." They'll pretend like they're loaning you money for this investment, and that'll get you more trusting of them. "Hey, they're putting in their money, so they're loaning me money without any kind of guarantee, so I'll continue to put in money," right? And I'm sure this sounds very familiar. So it goes on and on and on, and then at some point, you decide you want to take out some money; that's when the trouble starts, because now there is: you have to pay a tax, you have to pay an audit fee, you have to pay for some other type of cost.
Maybe whatever amount you have in there, let's say if you have $80,000 in there, they say, "Well, you can't take any money out until you hit 100,000, put in another 20, and then you can take out your 100," right? They come up with all these stories, and of course, at that point, you start to get nervous.

Sometimes you'll even do it just because you don't want to risk losing everything. You don't want to risk losing all the money you have or you put in there. Sometimes you've borrowed money from other people in your life to put money in; maybe you've referred other people in, and you don't want to jeopardize that by not doing what they say. They know how to manipulate you.

And then, of course, the problems start. Then you can't get your money out; they don't answer, and they start getting a little more aggressive and a little more nasty with you about not putting in money. And we'll, again, look at these red flags here in a minute. But then what'll happen is that you'll get to a point where you want to do an investigation to recover your money, and that's when you might even lose more money there. But let's first look at these red flags. This is a story about a person who lost his life savings after falling for an online scam. Remember, you're not alone in this; people do this all the time, and these scammers are slick. What are the red flags scammers will use language like guaranteed to lure and victims anytime you hear guarantee? That's a red flag. The minute you see this, it's a scam. Number two is that online scammers tend to utilize time pressure, so they're going to say you got to hurry up, you got to do it by tomorrow, you got to do it right away. The reason they want to do that is because they don't want you talking to other people that will talk you out of it, because if they say, "Hey, put the money in next week," you could talk to your friends or relatives or an attorney, and they'll tell you, "Don't do it," right? The human brain has a tendency to simplify information, and if they rush you, you won't have time to dig deeper into it. A great deal of information comes at a fast pace. This is what creates that bias, reducing the ability to spot a red flag. Online scammers create a false sense of trust, and that's what we talked about when they say, "Hey, I'm lending you money; I trust you; don't you trust me?" Or they'll find out other things in your life that you did trust or didn't trust. Remember that conversation that you had with them for many weeks or months? In that conversation, they're asking you questions to find out about your life, who you trust and who you don't trust, and they're going to use that against you later.

You might not even realize when it's happening. After learning about his life, the online scammer used his answers to coerce him into sending money because they knew about their lives, and then you end up losing your money. In addition to losing the money, after you are facing this loss, many times the biggest loss in your life is your sense of trust in other people. Sure, the money is painful, and it may be your life savings; it may be a significant chunk of things that you had, you know, planned on, but you also have emotional despair because now you have a trust problem. You don't know where to turn; you feel like you're completely bewildered, right? You don't know up is down, down is up, your feet are not on solid ground, you can't sleep, you can't eat, you don't want to tell people, sometimes you're embarrassed to tell your friends or relatives, and you don't have anybody to talk to. If that's the case, feel free to check out our website. You can arrange to talk to a consultant here, either an investigator or a conflict therapist, to help walk you through this. But now comes a possible risk of a second scam, and that is the scam of recovery of a fraud, and that's talked about in this article. Beware of cryptocurrency recovery scams. What happens is that you've been scammed once, and now other companies out there want to double dip and hit you up again. The FBI is seeing an increase in the in the number of scammers posing as companies offering to recover stolen cryptocurrency funds. So how does this work? How can you tell the difference between what's a scam and what's not a scam? The first one is this: anybody who says they can actually get the money back to you—that's a scam because no private organization can issue orders to confiscate stolen assets, any kind of asset, digital or money—nobody. The only person in the world who can issue an order is a judge. A judge can sign an order to do it; anybody else who says I'll get your money back and I'll give you the money is completely false; it's impossible. You do want to file with the IC3, as it says here. This is very good advice. The victim can also turn to civil court; remember, we talked about that. You will have to give them some evidence, some asset searching, and some research on identities. You can't just walk into court empty-handed, and this is where private sector companies like an investigative agency can help you find the assets, find the people, and identify who they really are because you can't sue somebody in court unless you know who they are. So here's the other thing: when you're doing this type of asset recovery, don't let your desperation, your panic, or your fear let you just pick anybody, and also don't pick somebody who contacted you. Many times, the original scammer that took your money will sell your identity or your contact information to this other company that says, "Hey, I'll get your money back," because they know you're already vulnerable and you're already likely to fall victim. So, they'll either sell it to somebody else, or maybe it's the same company that stole your money in the first place with another email, another WhatsApp, or another phone number that says, "Hey, I'll get your money back." It could be the same people, or they could have just sold your name to a scammer company.

How can you identify what's legitimate? First of all, make sure that the company you are dealing with is a licensed private investigative agency. Investigation is a licensed activity, in order to do private investigation, you have to have a certain government license to do it, verify that the company you're dealing with has a license to do this, the license is issued by the state where they're located, and they can work anywhere, they can work nationwide, they can do asset searches nationwide, but wherever their office is located, they have to have a license there, which leads me to the second part, verify that they actually have an office, that they have a physical location, you can do that by seeing their address, look on Google Maps, Google Earth, to make sure it's not a UPS store, make sure it's not some mailbox drop, make sure there's not 50 other companies at the same address just renting an address, and also look at their activity, look for like this YouTube videos, look for blog posts on their website, find out articles they've written, find out that they have this kind of experience and that they're real people, they have a name, there's an actual identity behind it, not just some murky company, especially overseas, and here's some of the other red flags, be wary of unsolicited offers, if somebody contacts you offering to help you recover, it's probably a scam, legitimate companies will not reach out to you because they don't know you were scammed, right? The only reason they would know that is if they're part of the deal. Don't give out personal information, don't give your social security number, don't give your bank account information, and don't give your crypto wallets because sometimes they'll get this to take more money. All you need to tell them is your name and email and the name of the company or place that stole your money. The investigative agency doesn't need to know your social security number; they don't need to know your bank account, right? Be suspicious of promises of guaranteed recovery; there's no guarantee you will recover lost crypto. If somebody promises you guaranteed recovery, it's a scam, end of story, because there's no way of knowing in advance if the scammer that took your money even has any money. What if they don't have any money? What if they spent it all? There's no way of knowing if they're good; they can probably find it, but there's no guarantee of it. Licensed activities, you know, licensed investigation type agency, physical location, don't deal with somebody who contacted you, you find them, don't let them find you, and if they guarantee recovery, that's a red flag.

It's tragic when a victim loses money in one of these crypto scams or any kind of investment scam because usually it's a lot of money and usually it's a big percentage of your assets that's gone because they know how to keep extracting money from you until all of a sudden you wake up and you have no money left. Sometimes you've even borrowed money from other people and put that money in, so you not only don't have assets, you might now have new debt, so be very careful of this. Again, you're probably watching this; it probably is too late to avoid it, but now take the right steps to make sure you're not scammed again by another company and that you do the best things you can to try to get some or all of your invested money back. And there's some other videos we've done on our website, activeintel.com, that will give you instructions on how to do this. We have consultations; you can click the link below to consult with a licensed investigator about some of the options you have about identifying the parties, doing an asset search, finding the money, and even getting suggestions on how to file with the proper authorities to make sure that the scammers are regulated and prosecuted properly. Hopefully, they get arrested, but either way, you want to make sure you take those actions. And if you're curious, do these people ever get in trouble? Yes, look at a prior video we did this week. We had a lot of questions over the last month about whether these scammers actually ever got caught. They do; lots of them get caught. As you can see in this video, we give a few examples of scammers that were arrested, indicted, thrown in jail, prosecuted, and had their money taken from them, so it does happen if you take the right action.