Mark Golotta lost thousands of dollars after being tricked into investing in a bogus cryptocurrency scheme by a woman he met online.
The South-East Melbourne resident got caught up in the scam during the pandemic and said his mental health wasn’t in the best shape at the time.
When he was 22, Mark was riding his motorbike to work when he was hit by a car. The accident killed the driver and left Mark paraplegic.
“The motorbike accident left me in a wheelchair. So, my mental health was pretty bad as it was,” the 38-year-old told Yahoo Finance.
During the pandemic, Mark was on the social media networking site Meet Me to try to make friends and find people to talk to online.
“I came across this one girl, who blew me off at first, and then she hit me back some weeks later. She told me about a Chinese stock market exchange,” Mark said.
The woman claimed she had made hundreds of thousands of dollars through the trading site and even gave Mark the login details to her account so he could see the investments going up and down.
Mark said the website looked “legit as could be”, so he decided to buy $3,500 worth of bitcoin and invest it through the site.
‘Should have seen it coming’
Mark only realised something wasn’t right when he noticed the ‘sell’ feature on the site was greyed out. When he confronted his new friend about this, she claimed it was because his investment hadn’t matured yet.
“But then, my maturity date came and went and I still couldn’t sell. So, that was quite a whack to the face,” Mark said.
After that, Mark said he couldn’t get in contact with the woman again and she stopped answering his messages. The website also stopped working and he was unable to access his money.
“We exchanged pictures and whatnot. I thought I was talking to a real person but the photos were always somewhere else of her holidaying because she’d made money off this site,” Mark said.
“I should have seen it coming. There were signs, but they weren’t obvious at the time.”
Rise in scam losses
According to Scamwatch data, 16,473 people with a disability reported being scammed in 2022, with reported losses of $33.7 million. This was a 71 per cent increase in financial losses compared to 2021.
Investment scams accounted for the biggest losses, followed by romance scams, threats and extortion scams, phishing scams and remote-access scams.
Ability Works CEO Sue Boyce said people with disabilities could be more susceptible to scams because they often felt socially isolated.
“People with disabilities tend to be more prone to people who try to make friends with them online via the usual social media sites,” Boyce told Yahoo Finance.
“Because of the social-isolation aspect, they are more vulnerable and they [may] fall for scams where someone is pretending to be really friendly and, because they are lonely, they will talk to them and get taken for a ride.”
Boyce also said the usual advice around setting long and complex passwords may not be suitable for people with cognitive or intellectual disabilities.
“It makes it really complicated because that means a lot of people have to be able to use technology. Passwords get forgotten and then you write it down on a piece of paper, which you can leave lying around – all that is increased risk,” Boyce said.
‘Do your homework’
Mark said he felt embarrassed about the scam and was unable to recover the $3,500 he had lost. The experience has also made him less trusting online.
“I don’t go looking for people anymore. I’m done with that. Rip me off once, shame on you. Rip me off twice, shame on me,” Mark said.
Mark has some simple advice for people to help them avoid being scammed.
“If it sounds too good to be true, it normally is. If you’re going to invest, you want to do your homework. I took chances and those chances didn’t pay off,” he said.
Since the scam, Mark said he’d been “kicking goals” in life. He met his now wife through his work and will be heading off on his honeymoon next week.
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