Just last month I was the richest I’d ever been. I had investments totalling £63,372, plus cryptocurrency totalling £93,984. I was giddy with excitement thinking of paying off my mortgage with change left over for a winter sun holiday with my husband.
And all this in a few months, from an initial investment of £200 in trading cryptocurrency. How exciting to be immersed in what’s described as the new ‘gold rush’.
Until, of course, I realised it was a scam and it all came tumbling down. Was I an idiot? You decide.
Here’s where it begins. In July 2024, I watch an Instagram ‘behind the scenes’ video of Radio 2 DJ Sara Cox in an argument with the This Morning presenter Ben Shephard. ‘How dare you close me down on-air like that?’ she demands. ‘Why shouldn’t I tell people about how I made £200,000 in one year if they could too?’
Ben Shephard rolls his eyes, ‘Because you just can’t do that, Sara, it’s irresponsible…cryptocurrency isn’t for ordinary people, it’s for clever cowboys.’
Sara shakes her head, ‘Not with these people at Victory Capital, it’s not. They make it easy, they hold your hand. I couldn’t believe it myself but it bloody worked!’
Things are biting financially, so I think it can’t harm to check it out. I Google Victory Capital, registered in Austin, Texas, with offices in London and Singapore. I read up about artificial intelligence trading and submit a contact form to see if I’m eligible.
I undertake never to invest more than 1 pc of my assets and don’t give any detail more personal than my phone number. I ‘register’ for the minimum investment of £200.
Susannah Jowitt was the richest she had ever been last month – her investments coupled with cryptocurrency totaled £93,984
I am duly messaged the next day on WhatsApp by Anthony Sharpe from the London office of Victory Capital and we fix another call a few days later.
He sounds American, with a trace of an Asian, possibly Filipino, accent, and is friendly, telling me how much he likes London since relocating from Texas, how he has looked me up and read some of my articles.
I say I’ve looked him up too but can’t find him on Instagram or LinkedIn; he explains earnestly that since his whole professional life is digital, he prefers to keep his personal identity out of his digital profile. It sounds credible.
He asks me how much return I want to make on my £200. I go large, to test him. ‘I want to make £4,000 because I want to buy my daughter a car.’ He laughs. ‘Try ten times that – within six months, Susannah!’
It opens up possibilities that are tempting… for a second. ‘Keep your head screwed on,’ I warn myself sternly.
I transferred the £200 to a Victory Capital account and log on, receiving a homepage ‘dashboard’ full of bar charts, jargon and official-looking regulatory warnings. I don’t know what they are but I feel intrepid.
In July, there is a worldwide IT outage when a botched update by security outfit Crowdstrike takes down nearly 10 million Windows devices. So when I get a server error on the URL for my ‘dashboard’, Anthony blames it on that and gives me a new link.
There, to my amazement, I see my new balance is the Bitcoin equivalent of £16,773. From an initial £200 stake, it had jumped up to £8,000 and then to £16,773. ‘You can buy your daughter that car now,’ laughs Anthony over the phone. Golly, I think, maybe this is going to work…
I decide to take some of the profits out because the crypto trading ‘world’ is essentially unregulated. Anthony says UK banks are nervous of Bitcoin transfers so to get the £4,000 I’m cashing in I need to set up trading accounts with a couple of halfway house apps: OKX to open a wallet of Bitcoin that can then be converted by Crypto.com into GBP and, from there, I can transfer the sterling balance into my bank.
It sounds complicated, with a whiff of tax evasion about it. Anthony reassures me it’s just a tax avoidance loophole, nothing illegal.
I Google OKX and Crypto.com, both cryptocurrency exchanges which pass the sniff test of Companies House.
Anthony offers to help me through the ‘very fiddly’ downloading of software on to my computer. ‘If you download AnyDesk (a screen-sharing app) on to your laptop, then I can do it for you,’ he explains casually.
Give control over my laptop to a stranger? Alarm bells ring. ‘No, that’s OK,’ I say equally casually. ‘Can we just go through it over the phone?’
He doesn’t miss a beat, ‘No problem at all. I was just trying to save you time.’
I download the apps myself but with Anthony telling me which boxes to check, how to answer the jargon-filled questions that pop up.
He then coaches me how to do the first transfer of 0.089 of a Bitcoin (the equivalent of £4,000) from my account with him at Victory Capital into my wallet at OKX.
A day later, he rings me and asks me to check my OKX balance. It still stands at zero.
Hmm, says Anthony, that’s strange. Check your emails and check your junk. I do and there’s an email with an OKX logo, saying that my account – and the transferred £4,000 – is frozen because of a failure to respond to an account verification email.
I respond to this, answering various questions and – eek – sending bank statements, then go off for my summer holiday.
‘How exciting it felt to be immersed in what’s described as the new ‘gold rush”, Susannah Jowitt said. ‘Until, of course, I realised it was a scam and it all came tumbling down’
There’s a nagging feeling it’s all too good to be true, but it is lovely dreaming of new sofas and the money to fund a few projects I had in mind. When I get back there’s another email in my junk folder, this time from OKX AML (Anti-Money Laundering), saying that I have not met compliance requirements and I must fund my crypto bank balance with sufficient funds of £5,000, to validate the account, as part of its ‘anti-money laundering system checks’.
‘Oh no,’ says Anthony, ‘You’ve triggered an AML flag. This is a bit of trouble. It’s a headache, let’s say.’
He says it’s because I failed to respond to a junk email meant and now had to prove I was a real person, not a scammer myself: quite the plot twist. But even I’m not that stupid. Down came the house of cards. It’s like the Canadian State Lottery saying you’ve won $14 million – but need to pay $20,000 tax to get it.
I Google the words ‘Sara Cox Ben Shephard crypto trading’. The clip has long since disappeared but there are discussions on various online forums about how a genuine video of them having a bit of a set-to backstage at ITV was overlaid with new audio, with AI reproducing their voices to talk about a ‘miracle crypto-trading money spinner’…
I say a final goodbye to my £200. I’m on to Anthony, but decide to play along. He tries to reassure me that the demand to pay £5,000 is legitimate. His English gets worse the further from the script we go.
‘They are telling you to send money to yourself on a genuine account that is verified and licensed, so I don’t really know how are you planning to get scammed by yourself,’ he says.
‘People are just being stupid. It’s very normal liquidity check. Yours is just quite big because your credit check didn’t come back too good.’
On the phone a few days later, we discuss next steps. He says we can track the transaction through Blockchain.com and he will extract a Hash ID number [a reference number] from them to unblock the £4,000.
He promises to get back to me with the Blockchain Hash ID. Little do I know this is the last time I ever speak to Anthony and the last time I will ever be able to access my ‘Victory Capital’ account. From here on, I initially get only evasive holding texts from him such as ‘let’s speak on Monday, I’m away for a few days’ and the VC link fails to work. Then, nothing.
Then, out of the blue, I get an email from Megan who says she works for a company I have never heard of saying: ‘A wallet belonging to you has been identified as potentially containing funds held in legacy, exposed to a third party software security issue.’
‘I see you have 1.4 Bitcoin, which is equivalent to approximately £97,580.29 in GBP. You need to show activity in your Blockchain Wallet by adding an amount of 0.011 Bitcoin (£510) to your balance.’
The scammers have clearly given up on getting £5,000, so are trying a new tactic to extract £510 from me. Megan gives me a call and I act the ingenue, expressing my delight that I have this sudden windfall but oh, silly little me, I don’t remember even setting up this account? So Megan sends me a screenshot of my wallet, whereupon we enter into farce.
The account is listed as being set up in December 2023, seven months before I even knew how to spell Blockchain. I point this out to Megan who pivots nimbly and says that’s because the account has been set up by fraudsters who have hacked my personal details and are now jumping on the Victory Capital transfer to ‘take the money overseas’. Cryptocurrency, being taken overseas? There are no seas in cryptocurrency and I nearly laugh out loud.
Megan, who’s tougher than Anthony but, strangely, with the same Filipina twang, hears my wobble and gets angry. ‘You are not taking seriously this amount of money, Susannah. You have a responsibility to activate this wallet and claim your money before these bad people take it away.’
Her voice changes up a register and becomes hectoring. ‘Listen to me well, Susannah, because Blockchain storing all this Bitcoin requires a lot of energy – many, many servers – and costs us a lot of money, so you must make this decision soon before you are robbed. Why are you complaining about this tiny fee when you could have £93,000 in your account by tomorrow? Are you stupid?’
Good cop, bad cop. Softly softly, catchee the gullible, followed up by gaslighting and abuse. It’s the classic scam approach, according to Mihir Magudia, a genuine Bitcoin entrepreneur who has built crypto-based businesses and even wrote a book in 2021 – Money Unbound: Bitcoin And The Breaking Of The Old World Order.
Mihir and I meet and, for an hour and a half, I experience the euphoria of what Bitcoin offers to the enlightened and the despair of the scammed. ‘Crypto trading’ is just window dressing for an age-old con. Other than the (empty) accounts I genuinely set up with OKX and Crypto.com, my £200 never even became Bitcoin, was never traded. If it had – in the real cryptotrading world – my £200 in July would now be worth just over £332: which, when annualised, means a return of 132 pc: not bad, but not as good as the 8,286.5 pc Anthony Sharpe had claimed.
‘You’re sold a dream, fed a script, blinded by jargon, harassed into making decisions by bullies playing a numbers game,’ Susannah Jowitt recalls following her initiation with cryptocurrency
‘If it seems too good to be true, it probably is,’ Mihir says sympathetically. ‘There is really no such thing as AI trading, no cryptobots doing nanotrades. It’s the old story of tulips, or Ponzi, updated for the 21st century: Bitcoin had nothing to do with this, it was just the words they happened to use.’
You’re sold a dream, fed a script, blinded by jargon, harassed into making decisions by bullies playing a numbers game.
I suspect that for every 100 people who lose that initial £200, they will persuade one poor sucker to pay the £5,000 ‘liquidity check’. For every 50 who won’t pay £5,000, they’ll trap one with the Blockchain routine and grab the £510.
Anyone who allows scammers to screenshare using the (perfectly legitimate) AnyDesk app runs the risk of their computers being hacked ‘behind the scenes’, at which point they can steal your identity. I tried to contact all the companies mentioned in this article. I tried to find phone numbers, but no joy. Email addresses listed online led nowhere.
When I ask Mihir, he isn’t surprised: ‘OKX is a massive Far Eastern company and doesn’t need to respond. Crypto.com is equally global, equally unaccountable. Blockchain is a thing, not a company. Only an industry that is regulated has any avenue for complaint: that’s why Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dao, they all simply exist, no hierarchies, no-one to alert. That’s why it’s got huge potential and huge risk.’
I received a further 20-odd increasingly aggressive calls from ‘Megan’, plus a frankly farcical phone call from a heavily accented man called ‘William Alexander’, who said he was calling from ‘HM Treasury’ about a complaint I had lodged about a cryptoscam.
‘Have I?’ I asked. ‘Lodged with the civil service?! How strange. Are you sure you don’t mean HMRC?’ Down went the phone.
This week I received several calls from Natalie at ‘Metatrader’, offering me ‘a full refund’, if only I would share my screen with her via AnyDesk or GoogleMeets so she could take me through the process.
When I said I wouldn’t share my screen with a stranger who rang up out of the blue, she became angry, accused me of wasting her time and put the phone down.
I ask Mihir how a housewife such as me can ever jump on the legit cryptocurrency bandwagon?
He looks at me a little sadly. ‘You can’t. That’s the realistic answer. To make money from crypto, you need to have money you can afford to lose, a working knowledge of the different currencies, NFTs and coins, a clear understanding of the risk and an appreciation of fees versus ease of process. You’d lost your £200 from the word go – but at least you made them work hard for it…’
- Have you lost a fortune in a cryptoscam? Email Moneymail@dailymail.com.
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