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. She got interested and responded, which is where things took a dark turn. A scammer, pretending to be Adam Manolas, who claimed to be an expert investment adviser, convinced her to open accounts with Easy Crypto and Binance. She thought her Bitcoin was safe in her Binance wallet, but instead, it was sent to an account controlled by the scammers. Once they emptied her savings, they even took funds that were meant for her grandchildren. In one of their last calls, she overheard him say, "This woman has no money."
It's painful to see how these scammers target older people, especially those who aren't tech-savvy and are more vulnerable to these tricks. I can't even begin to imagine how our granny feels after losing everything she worked for and inherited. Some might find it too much to handle and could even consider taking their own lives because of it. These scammers are truly cruel, and they deserve to rot in hell.
Without a doubt it is a very sad story, however it also indicates how her immediate and younger relatives did not took the time to teach her about the dangers of the internet in general, after all using your whole savings to invest in an asset you know nothing about, through people you have never met in real life will surely end up in a scam, so if anyone of us has a family member in a similar situation, we must do what we can to protect them from those predators, if we do not want the same to happen to them.