A man has seen his life turned upside down after he fell for an online scam, which saw him not only losing hundreds of euros, but also have his accounts frozen and face money-laundering charges.

The 35-year-old man has spoken up to alert the growing number of potential victims who are falling for the elaborate traps set by scammers and to urge them to file police reports if they are to avoid his current predicament.

Chris* was not aware what was going on when he received the notice summoning him to the police’s financial crimes department.

That morning, he woke up and left the home that he shared with his family to head to work, as he had done countless times before. Nothing could have prepared him for the fact that he would be spending that night in a prison cell.

When he showed up at FCID, he was arrested on the spot, charged with money laundering, and handling stolen money.

The charges dated back to an incident some months earlier when Chris had replied to a lucrative job offer on Facebook. The advert, for a company called Global Stable Growth, promised easy money through online crypto trading, a quick way for Chris to top up his salary.

Although he had a steady job, money was tight, and he was finding it difficult to make ends meet. The opportunity seemed too good to miss.

He enquired about the job, speaking to a representative of the company named ‘Vicky’ on Facebook Messenger. She eventually directed him to the company’s senior account manager, a man called ‘James Donald’, who contacted him through WhatsApp using a UK phone number.

In a series of WhatsApp chats, seen by Times of Malta, Donald explained how the job worked.

Although he had a steady job, money was tight, and he was finding it difficult to make ends meet. The opportunity seemed too good to miss

Chris would be working as an online trader, investing money through a crypto exchange such as Binance and earning income through his investments.

In addition to investing his own money, Global Stable Growth, his new employer, would also send him some additional funds to help him invest.

Chris was cautious at first, aware of how scammers tend to prey on people for a quick buck. But when Donald sent him €100 to get started, Chris was convinced that the job was real. If they were going to rob him, they would not be sending him money, he told himself.

Chris threw himself into the job wholeheartedly, watching his crypto earnings grow from one week to the next. Donald helped him along, sending him money from time to time to keep him going.

In total, Chris received some €6,000 to his Revolut account over several weeks, which he would then deposit through Binance and transfer onwards to other accounts.

Then came the catch.

If he wanted to withdraw his earnings and keep going, he would need to invest more and more money.

By the time he realised that the job was a scam, he was €900 out of pocket, having spent hundreds to try to recover his losses. Whenever Chris pleaded for help in getting his money back, Donald grew increasingly hostile.

Chris eventually decided to cut his losses, blocking Donald’s number and get on with his life. With little hope of reclaiming the €900 he lost, he thought there was no point taking things further, better to just forget about the whole incident.

That decision would soon come back to haunt him.

Maltese woman lost €70,000 through same scam

Chris’s lawyer told Times of Malta that he is not the only local victim of this scam, with a Maltese woman having lost €70,000 through the same scam.

After she filed a police report, hoping to catch the perpetrators and recover her funds, police traced some of her bank transfers to Chris’s Revolut account.

His lawyer says that of the €70,000 she lost, most went to foreign bank accounts, and only €7,000 went to Chris.

The scammers, he says, were effectively using Chris and people like him as middlemen, receiving money directly from other victims who have been ensnared and converting it to crypto which they would then send on to the scammers.

Chris vehemently denies any involvement. He insists he is a victim, unwittingly caught in a complex web woven by the scammers

Police, however, see things differently, and say he played an active part in the scheme.

Chris was charged with laundering the full €70,000, despite most of that stolen money having gone to other people, his lawyer says. 

Chris vehemently denies any involvement. He insists he is a victim, unwittingly caught in a complex web woven by the scammers.

He now faces a minimum fine of €20,000 if found guilty, almost three times the amount that effectively ended up in his account through the scam in the first place.

‘If only I had filed a report’

Chris rues the day that he failed to report the scam to the police. He says that the police told him that if he had, he would not have been considered a suspect and would have likely never been charged.

His lawyer eventually did file a police report about the scam after he was charged but little has come of it.

But Chris would be far from the first scam victim who did not report to the police.

A 2016 study by a group of Maltese criminologists found that only 81 per cent of victims of computer crime reported the crime to the police. This is likely to be even higher today, with online scams becoming pervasive.

This is most likely because “victims might tend to feel stupid for having fallen victim to this type of crime”, the study’s authors say, so victims are often embarrassed to own up to having been duped.

A 2016 study by a group of Maltese criminologists found that only 81 per cent of victims of computer crime reported the crime to the police

Several international studies estimate reporting figures to be just as low. British police believe that only 13 per cent of scam victims ultimately report crimes to the police.

Meanwhile, a European Commission study found that only about a fifth of those who experienced fraud reported it to an official authority. Most of the people who did not report, the study found, did so either because they felt the money they lost did not cause too much financial or emotional harm, or because they were not convinced that reporting would actually make a difference.

This comes as little consolation to Chris, who says that the ongoing court case has turned his life upside down and taken a huge emotional and financial toll. A freezing order on his bank account left him virtually penniless and dependent on his family for financial support.

A second arrest, this time for breaching his bail conditions, followed months later. But Chris hopes that the worst is behind him and that his story will help others in a similar predicament to evade the traps set by scammers and to report scams that they come across.

*Name has been changed to protect his identity.