The Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office says a 54-year-old woman lost $25,000 in an elaborate cryptocurrency scam. Chief Deputy Ben Houchin says the woman received a Microsoft security pop-up on her work computer.
When she opened it, Houchin says she was transferred to what she thought was credit union fraud department. “She was informed to make a phone call where she was informed that Russians had attempted to seize more than $27,000 from her account.”
Houchin says the woman was told to take $25,000 out of her account and put it into Bitcoin cryptocurrency. He says the woman also received what she thought was a phone call from someone pretending to be Sheriff Terry Wagner giving her a phony case number on the attempted theft from her bank account.
The woman contacted her bank but was not able to get her money back. “As we have learned through a lot of these, the money’s gone and this one was a major loss for her,” Houchin says. This is the second scam LSO has investigated in the past week. In the other case, a Denton resident lost $8,000 in an online scam.