Heartbreaking video footage shows the moment an elderly woman is tricked into depositing thousands of dollars into a Bitcoin ATM – just before police swoop in to help her.
The victim insisted she was on the phone to Chase Bank when confronted by officers responding to a 911 call from a concerned onlooker.
But it was actually heartless scammers on the other end of the line who had already convinced her into depositing $23,900 of her own cash into the machine.
Bodycam footage worn by Sergeant James Stewart shows him entering the Chevron gas station in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, and approaching the woman.
As she spots the officer, she is filmed saying: ‘Please, I have the bank on the phone. I’m in danger and this is Chase Bank.’
‘No you’re not, ma’am,’ Stewart said as he took her phone to talk to the fraudster.
Stewart is then heard berating the scammers, telling one of them: ‘If you were in my presence right now, you would be in handcuffs going to jail.’
A statement from local police states she withdrew $40,000 in cash from a Chase Bank branch. She was then instructed by criminals to deposit the cash in the Bitcoin ATM machine at the gas station.
Bitcoin ATMs are not fraudulent by themselves; they are simply a tool to convert cash into bitcoin.
If you already have a cryptocurrency wallet, the cash you deposit into the ATM will be sent there after you scan your personal QR code or input your wallet address – a lengthy string of numbers and letters.
But criminals will often prey on the elderly or people ignorant of crypto and tell them to send their cash to a specific wallet address or QR code that they provide.
And had it not been for Good Samaritan bystander Myndi Jordan, 38, the elderly woman would have lost every cent.
Jordan – who has fallen victim to identity theft herself – became alarmed after seeing the woman repeatedly put $100 bills into the machine at the insistence of somebody over the phone.
‘I noticed an elderly lady feeding thousands of dollars into the cryptocurrency machine and the people on the phone sound like foreigners,’ she told the 911 dispatcher.
‘They have her FaceTiming to make sure she’s putting the money in the machine. I just don’t think she’s aware of what she’s doing.’
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Shortly after her call, Stewart and another officer from the White Settlement Police Department arrived at the scene.
Stewart’s body camera captured him approaching the victim and his confrontation with the alleged scammer.
‘Stop putting money in there,’ he told her as he took her phone.
When Stewart asks who is on the other line, a male voice responds, saying he’s part of the ‘security team’ at Chase Bank.
‘No, you’re not,’ Stewart fires back. ‘If you’re really with the security team you can call my dispatch right now.’
The person then asks to be put back on the phone with the woman he’s duped, a request Stewart didn’t entertain for a second.
At one point, the suspect tries to convince the woman to take her phone back because the police have ‘no business’ interfering. He then tries to get his victim to continue pressing buttons on the machine.
‘Listen to me. She is not clicking on anything…what you’re doing is committing a crime,’ Stewart said, still holding the phone and speaking to the scammer.
The scammer repeatedly calls the woman ‘Christine,’ which eventually enrages Stewart because that isn’t her name.
When he’s called out for getting her name wrong, the criminal starts calling her ‘Kathleen.’
According to White Settlement police, the perpetrator arranged a rideshare to take the elderly woman to the bank to withdraw the $40,000 and another one to take her to the Bitcoin ATM.
The suspect allegedly hounded the woman for several days prior and even provided her a cover story to tell the bank for why she was withdrawing so much money all at once, NBC reported.
She believed that the person she was speaking with was from Chase Bank thanks to a common trick that allows criminals to mimic an organization’s number.
‘Fraudsters can also spoof a telephone number, which was done in this offense, where the victim saw ‘CHASE BANK’ on the caller ID,’ police said in a statement.
All major banks will never tell a customer to withdraw money over the phone.
Police said the woman was also told that she would be arrested if she didn’t withdraw the $40,000. This is a common ploy by scammers use to get people to make quick, irrational decisions.
Bitcoin ATM scams have become so prevalent that the Federal Trade Commission had to issue an advisory for consumers back in March.
When the woman realized that she’d been saved from depositing all of her money, she hugged both of the officers on the scene.
‘All I could do is visualize my mom in this case,’ Stewart said, talking about this case. ‘I wish we could find this guy and place him behind bars for a very long time because he is probably doing this to other people.’
White Settlement police is working to recover the woman’s lost funds with the help of a Bitcoin law enforcement liaison and the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office.
Jordan will be honored for what she did at the next White Settlement City Council meeting.
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