A woman from Ontario, Canada identified by CTV News by the first name Anjira recently was scammed out of $86,000 through an imposter scam.  Imposter scams are one of the most frequent scams throughout the world.  In this case Anjira received a call from a scammer posing as an investigator for the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), the Canadian version of the IRS.  The scammer told her that her bank accounts were involved in a money laundering scheme being investigated by the CRA.  He directed her to withdraw money from her bank accounts as well as take money from a line of credit she had at her bank and deposit the funds into a Bitcoin account given to her by the scammer.  She was told to use a Bitcoin ATM to transfer the funds, which she was told needed to be done in order to protect her funds.  As often is the case in this kind of scam, she was also told not to tell anyone at the bank why she was withdrawing the money.  Too late she realized that she had been scammed and the money is most likely lost forever.

TIPS

As I often tell you whenever you get a phone call, email or text message, you cannot be sure who is actually contacting you so you should never click on a link, provide personal information or make any payment in response to any communication unless you have absolutely confirmed that the communication was legitimate.

In this case there were a number of red flags that Anjira missed.  Even if there was an investigation as to her bank accounts being used for money laundering, there would be no reason for her to withdraw her money.  Also, there would be no reason whatsoever to withdraw money from a line of credit which could not possibly have been involved with money laundering.  In addition, no legitimate government agency requests payments be made through a Bitcoin ATM, however, Bitcoin ATMs are a favorite payment method for scammers due to their privacy.  Also, in making the withdrawals, she was told to make multiple withdrawals of $5,000 rather than withdraw all of the money at once.  The only reason for this was to make the individual withdrawals less suspicious to the bank.  Finally, being advised not to say anything to the bank clerks of officials is a strong indication that the entire thing was a scam.

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