(Mike Maharrey, Money Metals News Service) You can file this under the category of “things I never thought I’d need to write.”
Ladies and gentlemen, don’t give gold to a stranger in a Walmart parking lot, even if they say, “black bug!”
Yes, this happened.
In real life.
It started last April when a pop-up appeared on a 78-year-old woman’s computer in southern Illinois.
She’d been hacked.
So the woman, identified as D.B. in court documents, googled Microsoft support and called the first option that appeared on her screen.
And here’s the first lesson. You need to be careful with Google – especially those first “sponsored” links. Scammers can buy them too. If you’re looking for a company, go down into the results and find the unsponsored entry and double-check that the link itself looks legit. If you notice strange spellings or random characters, it’s probably a scammy link.
D.B. chose poorly and ended up clicking a scammy link. When she dialed the number, she connected with “Mike Williams,” who claimed he was a supervisor on Microsoft’s fraud prevention team.
Mike had bad news.
D.B.’s computer had been hacked and her personal data potentially compromised. Of course, Mike needed to access her computer to see how bad things were.
That’s where D.B. made her second big mistake.
She let him into her computer.
And that’s when things got bad.
It was the beginning of what Capitol News Illinois called “an elaborate months-long scheme.”
Mike passed D.B. along to “Kevin Jones,” who claimed to be a fraud agent with Edward Jones Investments. Based on the Capitol News description, he sounds like the classic abusive boyfriend.
“Jones told D.B. that her Edward Jones account had indeed been compromised — and protecting it would require extreme measures. He then had her sign a purported nondisclosure agreement in which D.B. agreed to keep the operation a secret from family and law enforcement. Jones mandated that D.B. maintain regular contact with him, asking that she send ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’ texts every day. She was provided a ‘tracker phone’ that Jones monitored.”
Yikes.
Jones convinced D.B. to move $1.8 million from her investment accounts into money market accounts. Then they told her to buy gold bars that federal agents could put in safekeeping while they secured her compromised accounts.
D.B. bought over $823,000 in gold.
Jones instructed her to package gold so she could hand it off to a federal Treasury agent in the parking lot of a Marion, Illinois, Walmart. He would identify himself with the code word, “black bug.”
D.B. did as instructed and handed over $318,459 in gold bars.
She’ll never see them again.
I probably don’t need to say this – or maybe I do. If a “federal agent” asks you to hand off gold in a Walmart parking lot, he is 100 percent NOT a federal agent. So, just don’t.
Now, you might be thinking, ‘How can anybody fall for this? I certainly wouldn’t.’ And you might not. But a lot of people do, and as a gold dealer told Capitol News, even smart people get duped because “people will do anything the minute they feel fear.”
The proof is in the numbers. According to the FBI, it documented 1,700 scams involving transfers of bulk cash or gold bars since 2023, resulting in $186 million in losses.
You have to give these scammers credit for getting gold. Transferring large amounts of cash is easy to trace. Gold – not so much.
Gold is real money. They can take those bars anyplace in the world, and somebody will take them in exchange for goods and services, or the fiat currency of their choice. Everybody might not want a dollar, or a yuan, or a yen. Everybody wants gold.
As a bullion dealer told Capitol News Illinois, “Gold can be a smart investment alongside traditional portfolios, but it’s also attractive to scammers because it’s hard to trace once it changes hands.”
Needless to say, the scammers were pleased with the exchange and immediately began pressing D.B. to liquidate more assets and buy more gold.
But by this point, our victim finally started getting suspicious. She called the police when she received documents from Jones related to the first handoff, and the seal didn’t look real.
With the help of law enforcement, D.B. set up another gold drop. This time they were to meet in the parking lot of a local church, and the password was “poker queen.”
Just so you know, handing gold to people you don’t know in the church parking lot isn’t any better than doing it at Walmart.
However, handing him a box of sandbags – that’s cool.
And that’s exactly what D.B. did.
Police arrested our intrepid “federal agent” a few minutes later.
His name was Ruoyu Lian, a 30-year-old who lived in Flushing, New York. According to the Capitol News, Lian pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, offenses that could carry sentences of up to 20 years and $250,000 in fines each.
He was the only person arrested in the case.
Investigators said Lian was a low-level player in the conspiracy. County State’s Attorney Joe Cervantez said he received very little pay (about 2 weeks’ pay at his restaurant job in N.Y.) to fly to Illinois and play the role of federal agent.
“Lian is expendable to them,” Cervantez said. “At the end of the day, everybody in the scheme is still on to the next one.”
So, beware. They’re out there trolling for the next victim. You can avoid scams like this by taking some basic precautions.
Here are some tips that will help you sniff out and avoid scams.
- If someone asks you to move your money, treat it as a red flag. Government agents will never tell you to empty your bank account, move cash, or buy gold. They certainly won’t tell you to meet them at Walmart.
- Verify independently. If somebody gets you on the phone, hang up and dial the bank or company directly. And remember, beware of those Google links.
- Don’t act on unexpected computer warnings. They are almost always scams. Don’t call pop-up numbers or click pop-up links. And for heaven’s sake, don’t give strangers access to your computer.
- If you feel pressured, you are. Treat it as a red flag.
- Only do business with established, trusted companies such as Money Metals.
Mike Maharrey is a journalist and market analyst for Money Metals with over a decade of experience in precious metals. He holds a BS in accounting from the University of Kentucky and a BA in journalism from the University of South Florida.
