Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Professional scammer Mitch says most people in his industry fall into two categories: They’re psychopaths, who enjoy what they do, or they are deluding themselves about the terrible impact of their crimes.
“The main thing you do to prove yourself is take their last money, put them in crippling debt,” he says. “That’s something that you don’t forget.” “They promise, promise from the bottom of their heart that everything will be right, but it’s just so full of lies,” says Janelle Free, a retired hairdresser from Queensland.“They’d take your blood, if they could, they’d take your organs, they would literally kill you to get the last out of you, and they’re so good at it.”
“What they usually do is they segregate the accounts. Let’s say they have 100 ads running. It’s not going to be under one roof. It’s going to be under 100 roofs. And if one roof gets torn apart, you just change one roof, not all hundreds.” Sometimes, this trade happens in plain sight. Dangu points out a website where affiliate marketers sell services and scammers seek to buy “leads”. Affiliate marketers even publish blogs explaining how they successfully scammed people.
They might ask people if they remember clicking on an ad, tell them “we have received your inquiry about potential investment opportunities”, or say that they “know you’ve been looking for fixed-term deposits”.“So most of the time, they will just respond and say ‘Oh, I remember that, I did go online and click on your ad’... That’s the time they start pitching them.”
Meticulous spreadsheets kept by a large scamming syndicate and seen by this masthead give a unique insight into this early step of the scamming process. They show, down to the second, when each victim made their first scam payment, and which particular fake investment brand, with names such as ArrowTeks, Aussie Trust and London Gates, was used to swindle them.
It’s also not unusual for criminals to apply another filter to who they target, screening out citizens of countries whose law enforcement they fear, and focusing on those they don’t. While the early steps of an online investment scam tend to be structured, based on set scripts and automated systems, the next phase, often dubbed “retention”, is different.
Ramon says the strategy he uses to get victims to part with larger amounts of their money usually begins with a call in which he brings “great news” of a promising but time-sensitive investment opportunity. “I feel now like I have been a victim of a religious society where they brainwash you,” she says. “I thought I was a smart person… then to go through this, you just feel so degraded and so humiliated and so stupid, so very stupid.”
“I just thought he was like God’s gift. To have someone helping me to be more financially secure that I could help my children. I just had such faith in him and such belief. Free remembers she was told that Fischer was sick the night it all came crashing down. A man called Jacob was in his place. Several months before, in March, Fischer had convinced Free to sell her house, spinning her stories about a looming boom in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. He said it would bring Free and her family untold prosperity if she took advantage of it.
The grandmother of five had more reason to trust him than most. The fraudsters had been paying back Free a proportion of her investment to give the impression of genuine profits, a technique dubbed “pig butchering”, meaning fattening the pig before you slaughter it.Free estimates that once expenses were taken out, there was about $900,000 left, all sent to Fischer. The scammer also convinced some of Free’s close friends and relatives to invest.
Ken Gamble, executive chairman of IFW Global, says he has forensically linked the syndicate that targeted Free and her associates to an Israeli criminal group with call centres in Cyprus, Bulgaria and Serbia.
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