Heartbreaking video shows the moment an elderly woman is tricked into depositing thousands of dollars into a Bitcoin ATM, just before police swoop in to help her.
The victim insisted she was on the phone with Chase Bank when she was confronted by officers responding to a 911 call from a concerned bystander.
But it was actually heartless scammers on the other end of the line who had already convinced her to deposit $23,900 of her own cash into the machine.
Body camera footage worn by Sergeant James Stewart shows him entering the Chevron gas station in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, and approaching the woman.
When she sees the officer, she is filmed saying: ‘Please, I have the bank on the phone. I’m in danger and this is Chase Bank.
Police body camera footage shows the elderly woman depositing cash into a bitcoin ATM inside a Chevron gas station convenience store.
“No, it’s not, ma’am,” Stewart said as he grabbed his phone to talk to the scammer.
Stewart is then heard berating the scammers, telling one of them: “If you were in my presence right now, you’d be in handcuffs going to jail.”
A local police statement states that she withdrew $40,000 in cash from a Chase Bank branch. The criminals then ordered him to deposit the cash into the Bitcoin ATM at the gas station.
Bitcoin ATMs are not fraudulent in and of themselves; They are simply a tool to convert cash into bitcoins.
If you already have a cryptocurrency wallet, the cash you deposit at the ATM will be sent there after you scan your personal QR code or enter your wallet address, a long string of numbers and letters.
But criminals often prey on older people or people who are ignorant of cryptocurrencies and tell them to send their cash to a specific wallet address or QR code they provide.
And if it hadn’t been for good Samaritan onlooker Myndi Jordan, 38, the elderly woman would have lost every penny.
Jordan, who has also been a victim of identity theft, became alarmed after seeing the woman repeatedly feed $100 bills into the machine at the insistence of someone on the phone.
“I noticed an older lady putting thousands of dollars into the cryptocurrency machine and the people on the phone looked like foreigners,” he told the 911 operator.
‘They have your FaceTiming to make sure you’re putting the money in the machine. I just don’t think he’s aware of what he’s doing.
Shortly after his call, Stewart and another officer from the White Settlement Police Department arrived at the scene.
Stewart’s body camera captured him approaching the victim and his confrontation with the alleged scammer.
“Stop putting money there,” he told her as he grabbed his phone.
When Stewart asks who is on the other end of the line, a male voice answers, saying he is part of the Chase Bank “security team.”
“No, you’re not,” Stewart responds. “If you’re really with the security team, you can call my headquarters right now.”
The person then asks to get back on the phone with the woman he cheated on, a request Stewart didn’t consider for a second.
At one point, the suspect tries to convince the woman to give him the phone back because the police “have no business” interfering. He then tries to get his victim to continue pressing the buttons on the machine.
‘Listen to me. “She doesn’t click on anything…what you’re doing is committing a crime,” Stewart said, still holding the phone and talking to the scammer.
The scammer repeatedly calls the woman “Christine”, which eventually angers Stewart because that is not her name.
When they call him out for saying her name wrong, the criminal starts calling her ‘Kathleen’.
Myndi Jordan, pictured, called police about the situation and is seen here telling Sergeant James Stewart that the elderly woman had deposited more than $23,000.
According to White Settlement police, the perpetrator arranged a carpool to take the elderly woman to the bank to withdraw the $40,000 and another to take her to the Bitcoin ATM.
The suspect allegedly harassed the woman for several days beforehand and even provided her with a cover story to tell the bank why she was withdrawing so much money at once. NBC reported.
She believed the person she was speaking to was from Chase Bank thanks to a common trick that allows criminals to spoof an organization’s number.
“Scammers can also spoof a phone number, as was done in this crime, where the victim saw ‘CHASE BANK’ on the caller ID,” police said in a statement.
All major banks will never tell a customer to withdraw money over the phone.
Police said the woman was also told she would be arrested if she did not withdraw the $40,000. This is a common ploy scammers use to get people to make quick, irrational decisions.
The agents arrive at the store where the elderly woman was brutally scammed by phone by a stranger.
Bitcoin ATM scams have become so prevalent that the Federal Trade Commission had to issue a notice for consumers in March.
When the woman realized that she had saved herself from depositing all her money, she hugged the two agents who were at the scene.
“All I could do is visualize my mom in this case,” Stewart said, speaking of this case. “I wish we could find this guy and put him behind bars for a long time because he’s probably doing this to other people.”
White Settlement Police are working to recover the woman’s missing funds with the help of a Bitcoin Police Liaison and the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office.
Jordan will be honored for what she did at the next White Settlement City Council meeting.
