In another incident we’ve had brought to our attention, this person has been scammed out of approximately £80,000. Retiring shortly, he wanted to grow his retirement fund by investing some of his money in cryptocurrency but unfortunately invested all of it into a scam.
The person contacted us and asked if there was anything we could do to help recover his money. We took at look at what had happened and this person has unfortunately been scammed twice.
Scam 1 – Investing – FXCT Investments
Initially he found an online broker who dealt in cryptocurrency called FXCT Investments. He started off paying them a small amount, and from that point they contacted him almost daily to say his investment was growing massively and he should really put more and more money in. This is did to the tune of £80,000. Then out of the blue, his ‘broker’ at the company ‘disappeared’. Naturally our client was worried and was then contacted by a colleague to say that his entire investment had been converted into several Bitcoins. As he hadn’t had an explanation for the disappearance of his broker and was beginning to get suspicious he told FXCT he wanted to withdraw his money. This leads us onto…
Scam 2 – Withdrawing – Coinalrec
The client heard nothing more from FXCT but was soon contacted by Coinalrec, another scam company. Coinalrec posed as a crypto investigation company that could help our client recover his Bitcoin. Part of an email they sent to him is below
What Coinalrec have written above is inaccurate and incorrect, but they rely on the victim not having sufficient knowledge to know this. All the victim sees is that this is a possible way to get his Bitcoin back. Sure enough an invoice from Coinalrec followed asking for €9793 in advance, to recover the Bitcoin. Again, this is a complete scam, our client’s Bitcoin never existed. The money he gave to FXCT had been spent by them, and then Coinalrec appeared to try and take more money from him.
Background checks
You should always do background checks on a company before you start investing with them. A Google search for both FXCT Investments and Coinalrec brings back multiple scam alerts on page 1 of the search results. I’m not saying “I told you so”, but finding this information took me less than a minute.
Coinalrec
https://www.scamdoc.com/view/682338
https://www.scamadviser.com/check-website/coinalrec.com
FXCT Investments
https://www.fca.org.uk/news/warnings/fxct-investments
https://scamwatcher.org/fxct-investments-review/
Take a look at our 2022 Crypto Scams page here: https://recovermycryptowallet.com/cryptocurrency-scams-in-2022/
