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RETIRED musician Jane Evans lost £2,000 when she tried to invest cash to help pay for treatment for a rare form of cancer.
The 71-year-old, who lives in North Wales, has no private pension as she had been a freelancer on a low income, and only a small amount of savings.
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She was able to borrow money from friends and family, as the specialist treatment she needed was unavailable on the NHS.
She hoped that by investing in Bitcoin she would be able to make some money back to repay her family – but it all went terribly wrong.
“I saw Bitcoin was going to go from $30,000 to about $300,000 over the course of a year,” Jane said.
“My idea was that if I just put £1,000 or £1,500 into Bitcoin, I know it’s terribly volatile and risky but it’s not like I’m putting everything in the world in it.
“I thought if I just let it go up and down, in a year’s time it might be worth £10,000 and I could take the money out and pay everybody back.”
Jane found what she thought was a legit trading platform called Trader Pros.
The company told her to set up a crypto wallet on a cryptocurrency exchange and guided her through the process as she deposited £250 just to “dip a toe in the water.”
The money appeared in her Traders Pros account and soon she was told it had made £100 profit.
She even tested out the withdrawal process with a small amount and it worked, so she felt confident the company was legitimate.
Then came a phone call from her account manager, demanding to know more about her assets, pension and what money her husband had.
The account manager wanted her to deposit more money.
“It was as a result of the high-pressure phone call that we deposited the next £1,750. Our account manager showed us graphs of the meteoric rise of Bitcoin over the last months, and a projection that Bitcoin would reach over $100,000 by the end of 2021,” said Jane.
How did she feel after this call? “Buoyant! We thought we’d be able to pull together enough for my dendritic cell therapy, which costs about £7,000.
“The cancer I have is a very aggressive one and there aren’t many options if it comes back.
“We weren’t at all suspicious of the account manager – he seemed very nice and we were taken in by the website.”
When she realised that the company was trading her money using a dangerous and high-risk strategy called leverage or margin trading, she tried to withdraw her money.
“The £2,000 we had invested made quite a good profit in the first couple of weeks but then started to go down pretty rapidly,” she explained.
“We kept reading about the uncertainty around crypto and got cold feet.”
The company demanded she send ID documents and said she needed to pass compliance checks, even though she had already given this information when she signed up.
INVESTOR WARNING
It turns out the company is an unregulated platform based in China. The financial watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority, has since warned investors against using it in a warning notice about this unauthorised firm which is targeting UK consumers.
But that was too late for Jane.
She added: “After a lot of messing around for a month, in desperation I sent an email saying ‘we haven’t got a lot of money, we’re not wealthy people and we can’t afford to just say goodbye to £2,000. If you’ve got a decent bone in your body, send it back because I may need it for cancer treatment.’ I haven’t heard anything more.”
Jane says the account manager has now blocked her on WhatsApp.
Because Jane deposited her money using her Barclaycard, she thought of doing a chargeback where a payment can be reversed by the credit card company, but Barclays said it couldn’t claw back the money because she had not paid it directly to Traders Pros, but to a third party crypto exchange.
Since The Sun contacted Barclays, the bank has agreed to refund some of her money as a goodwill gesture.
A spokesperson for Barclaycard said: “We are very sorry to hear about Ms Evans’ experience. Where a customer has a dispute with a merchant about a payment made using their credit or debit card, we may be able to raise a dispute on their behalf under the Chargeback scheme rules.
“A chargeback dispute is never guaranteed, and we can only raise a case under certain circumstances, for example if the goods or services that the customer purchased never arrived, or weren’t as described.
“In cases involving foreign currency or cryptocurrency, we may not be able to raise a dispute if the currency was provided as described by the merchant at the point of sale.
“However, to recognise the long-standing relationship we have with Ms Evans, we have refunded the £256.64 payment as a gesture of goodwill. If she hasn’t already, we would also recommend that she reports this matter to Action Fraud.”
In another twist in the tale, scammers are now calling and emailing Jane saying they can recover her money from Traders Pros if she deposits more money and gives them remote access to her computer and phone.
One even said her money on Traders Pros has grown to €50,000, and she could get it back by depositing £20,000 with them to “verify her bank account”.
“I don’t really have any hope of getting my money back,” said Jane, “but I do think something should happen so they can’t keep doing it to other people, because it feels so desperately unfair.”
UK CONSUMERS TARGETED
Cryptocurrency scams are spreading like wildfire as more consumers try to jump on the bitcoin bandwagon.
Consumers have lost more than £146m to crypto fraud up to October 2021, more than a third more than for the whole of 2020, according to Action Fraud.
The crypto market is not regulated and fraud is rife, so it’s easy to fall prey to dodgy firms honing in on UK consumers with increasingly sophisticated scams.
Financial watchdog, the FCA, is not a fan of cryptocurrencies and has already banned the sale of certain products linked to crypto prices to inexperienced investors.
“We’ve seen consumers in the UK increasingly targeted by this type of scam,” the FCA told The Sun.
“You should be wary of any advert or social media promising high returns on these types of investments and do further research to check out the company you’re giving money to.
Even when dealing with a legitimate company, its worth remembering that investing in crypto is unregulated, and consumers should be prepared to lose all their money if they do invest.”
Traders Pros did not respond to The Sun’s requests for comment.
Jane has so far not got her money back from Traders Pros, but her cancer is in remission.
Brit bitcoin expert Layah Heilpern dishes out crypto advice to her followers on TikTok
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