MANTECA – A Manteca mother contacted CBS13 and Call Kurtis’ Consumer Investigative Team after she saw something about Bitcoin on her Facebook feed and fell victim to a scam.
Angelina Diaz was already thinking about Bitcoin when she saw a high school friend post on Facebook about how much money he was making investing in the cryptocurrency.
Living payday to payday, Diaz decided she should take advantage and speculated that this could be the next Google or Apple. After all, she had just received a $2,000 bonus from work. She was inspired by a friend’s post, in which she posted a photo of her luxurious new home and wrote, “I’m so happy and grateful. Bitcoin mining has made my life so much easier.”
“Like everybody else, I see this as the next best thing,” she said. “I’ve never done anything like that before. I’ve never really been in the next best thing. It’s something I really don’t want to do. I’m very conservative with my investments and stuff, very conservative. So, again, I just wanted to jump in. This is my opportunity.”
Diaz, a single mother of three, had always dreamed of owning her own home, and after messaging with a friend, she was told the dream was real.
“I rent,” Diaz added, “and I’ve rented my whole life. So yeah, it’s like, when you’re over 40, you’re looking at houses and you want the same thing for all your friends.”
She then contacted an investment manager friend. She transferred $2,000 via Zelle and set up an account on a website called Bitgose.com, which was the official website with a live ticker.
Diaz said that within five hours, a $2,000 investment in Bitcoin grew to $100,000.
“I don’t think that’s the case, because if that were the case, then everyone would be complicit in it,” she said.
Realizing something was fishy, Diaz tried to withdraw his money but was told he needed another $3,000 and insisted that it would be refunded.
We asked Diaz what he was thinking at the time.
“Yeah, I see it every day,” she explained. “Every day.”
Jimmy Hasani of the FBI said the value is usually a bit more modest, between $2,000 and $3,000. Hasani said they sometimes allow people to withdraw their first earnings to build trust.
“They take a gamble,” Hasani said, “and then the victim realizes it’s not a scam and tries to reinvest. But when they try to reinvest, they get a little pop-up in their account that says, ‘You’re no longer eligible.'”
Unless you invest a much larger amount.
The FBI has dubbed this type of scam “hog slaughter.”
“Why pig slaughter?” Hasani asked. “Because it’s an unfortunate title.”
Hasani said scammers use stolen photos to try to gain trust.
Victimization, or piglet trust as it is called, means investing more and more money until your savings are gone.
Once you have been scammed, you may end up in a database on the dark web and be attacked again by someone posing as a “recovery team.”
“And this is a new type of scammer. They say, ‘It looks like you’re losing a lot of money. I know the FBI can’t help you, but we can,'” he said.
Of course, there is a fee.
The FBI reported that 9,575 people in California fell victim to cryptocurrency scams last year, resulting in losses of nearly $1.2 billion.
In Diaz’s case, a closer look at the bitcoin website she was using to invest offers some clues that something is amiss.
We ran a Google Image Search on photos of the people who were said to have written testimonials for this website and found that the same photos were in fact appearing on a number of different investment sites, along with the exact same testimonials, just with different names for the sites.
The address at the bottom of the website – a Google search reveals that it’s the same address as New York University’s journalism program.
The school confirmed to CBS13 that there are no investment projects at the school.
Diaz admitted that the bank warned him before sending the money through Zelle, but he still pressed the send button.
“It’s embarrassing,” Diaz said. “I knew better. I knew better. And I’m supposed to be a professional, you know? And I’m supposed to be a mother. I’m supposed to be smart. I’m supposed to go to school and get all the grades, but I don’t know what it was. Honestly, I don’t know what it was.”
Diaz isn’t angry at the bank, he’s angry at himself.
“I was targeted, but I allowed myself to be targeted,” she said. “They’ve already got my $2,000. For me, karma felt like the universe, honestly, for me personally. I mean, I felt like, you know? I should have given the money to my mom. I mean, I should have given it to whoever needed it. But I felt like if this was karma for any negative impact that I’ve had or spewed or for my kids or people around me, then I deserved it. So I’m kind of a self-inflicted person. It was like I was punishing myself, you know? So I feel like this was self-punishment for myself.”
Diaz later learned that her friend had also been scammed.
But there’s good news for Diaz: She disputed the charges with the bank, which denied her claim. However, she said the bank worked through her appeal and was able to get her money back.
She regrets that she should have spoken to her friend on the phone instead of just messaging him before giving her money to the scammer.
More from CBS News
Curtis Min
