PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. (CBS12) — Port St. Lucie Police are searching for the suspects behind a sophisticated investment scam.
Police say there may be dozens of victims from all over the country, including one elderly man on the Treasure Coast.
The man, who wished to remain anonymous, told CBS12 News that this all began when he was contacted about what appeared to be a business school on WhatsApp late last year, and he began taking classes.
“John Anderson Business School’ and he had the resume that showed he had been in Wall Street and Harvard,” the man recalled. “The resume was so good, it was too good.”
The man said there were over 100 people in this virtual school, so he went along with it.
“They set up videos that he could actually go in,” said Economic Crimes Unit Detective Paul Griffith. “I’m sure they were videos stolen from other financial investors but they actually put them on this site for him to go into.”
He was then asked to start investing in stocks based on what he had learned, creating real accounts through PNC Bank to make transactions.
When those accounts started showing millions in returns, alarm bells started ringing.
“As I progressed along, they were promising more and more reward and it came a point in time when I thought it was a little bit ridiculous actually. So, I became very suspicious at that point,” the man explained.
The $315,000 he had invested into those accounts was in jeopardy.
The scammers were sucking him into a cryptocurrency app, and his money wasn’t his anymore.
“They created an account for him, that’s how elaborate this was,” Det. Griffith remarked. “He was going in, thinking that he was visualizing his account but it really was a scam, is what they were setting up, it was fake.”
In February, the man went to Port St. Lucie Police to report the scam and Detective Griffith was able to track down the account.
On Tuesday, the detective handed the man a check for the $315,000 he thought he lost.
“When the detective informed me, I think he said ‘I have got your money back.’ he didn’t say ‘I’ve got your investment,’ (he said) ‘I have got your money back.’ I just about passed out,” the man shared.
“We’re doing a search warrant for the victim’s funds. We’re going into that account and we’re recovering whatever money we can out of that account,” Detective Griffith said, when asked how investigators recovered the money. “He got lucky the account got shut down early because PNC noticed that there was fraud on the account and the money was still there.”
No arrests have been made, but the investigation is ongoing.
Detectives believe the scammers may be Chinese nationals, based on the names that were on the accounts.