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Police arrested a man suspected of taking a Bethesda, Maryland, couple for $400,000 in a gold bar scam.
A text message reading “Contact us about an unauthorized charge on your Apple account” led the couple down a scam rabbit hole, police said. They were led to believe they were talking by phone to real Apple employees and eventually, according to police, they spoke with 23-year-old Yongxian Huang, who allegedly pretended to be an employee of the Federal Trade Commission.
The couple was told their money had been compromised by criminals and needed to be converted to gold and put into government safekeeping to keep it from being used to make child pornography and purchase missiles for Russia, police said.
They were convinced to give two purchases of gold bars worth more than $367,000, as well as a wire transfer of more than $41,000, investigators said.
“If you get these messages, you are not required to answer the phone,” Montgomery County Police Detective Sean Petty said. “You aren’t required to click that message and give your information away.”
With the victims’ help, detectives coordinated a final drop of $81,000 in gold bars on Nov. 14. Huang accepted the package from a detective pretending to be the female victim, police said.
Investigators followed him up Interstate 95 to his home in Brooklyn, New York, where New York Police Department detectives arrested him.
He awaits extradition to Maryland, as does 26-year-old Yash Shah, arrested this week in Baldwin, New York.
Shah’s accused of scamming an 88-year-old Montgomery County woman and her 61-year-old daughter out of $2.3 million in a similar scheme in 2023.
Recovery is almost impossible.
The fact this keeps happening despite extensive news coverage means families should consider it a table topic when they get together for the holidays, Petty said.
“This can easily be a 5, 10-minute conversation just checking in with your loved ones, your aging individuals, making sure that they’re not getting these phone calls, these text messages, and responding positively to them,” he said.
Montgomery County police worked with the Baltimore Field Office of the FBI on this case.
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