Description

I was invited into a "copy trading" group, by my brother's friend that swore his boss and brother had both made a bunch of money with. The scammer used the name, Austin Edal, which I checked out online and on social media. I even checked Chat GPT and it confirmed he was a real person who was a day trader. He has many videos on TikTok, teaching trading methods, so I figured it was legit. I no longer think that was his name. The initial investment was 5K, with the promise that he would take it to $50K, and then we could pull out. He then kept pressuring me to add more, saying I didn't qualify for the bigger trades, so I added more and more till I was in 46K. Then, when I went to take my money out, he had raised my "goal" to 500K, and told me I would have to pay a 5% penalty fee if I wanted to withdraw. At that point, I had no choice, so I paid another 16K, and he then send me ETHM, instead of ETH, which is absolutely worthless.. As soon as I discovered what he had done, I confronted him. No response. I quickly messaged the other 28 members of the group to let them know as well, and found that many of them had also been scammed... the rest just learned what was going on. Within hours, he deleted both his telegram, as well as the trading website: [email protected]. My brother lost around 100k, and several other family members lost thousands as well. It all just disappeared.