This story is truly heartbreaking, knowing that a 72-year-old woman lost her entire life savings and inheritance, totaling $224,000, to crypto scammers. They used a deepfake video of Christopher Luxon, the New Zealand Prime Minister, to lure her in.
It's a very sad story and I wish that the woman will get support from police, government to catch scammers and recover her money back. It will be very long story and at this moment, I only can wish the woman best of luck.
About this scam, she was too naive to believe that the man who called her is the NZ Prime Minister. She would have known that man is very busy with his powerful position, and she ignored one more red flag. How did a NZ Prime Minister call her just to invite her invest money into something, in this case invest in cryptocurrency.
It's very basic scam method.
The cryptocurrency scam book.Right, the method is so basic but for people who aren’t tech-savvy and are already at their retirement age, they won’t realize that easily that they are already falling into a big scam. I felt pity for the old woman because in just one glimpse of an eye, all of her hard-earned savings and inherited money are completely gone. This brings lesson to everyone that scamming targets all ages, without exception. So we need to be more cautious with the people around most particularly when big amount of money is already involved.