Tennessee Man Loses $80,000 USD in Cryptocurrency Investment Scam, Wiping out his Entire Life Savings

Zack Love
5 min readAug 18, 2022

A Tennessee man is devastated after a scammer on WhatsApp fools him into investing into cryptocurrency. Find out what happened to this poor man.

Photo by F. Muhammad from Pixabay

Most scams start in a similar fashion. An unknown person contacts the victim by phone, text, email or WhatsApp and starts an unlikely “friendship” with the victim. The scammer slowly builds a rapport and trust with the victim, and then they strike the victim like a cobra in the dead of night.

Ricky Smith Fell for the Cryptocurrency Scam

58-year-old Ricky Smith of Memphis, Tennessee didn’t see it coming, but now that he’s been through it, all he has left is his story after the scammers took every penny of his life savings — to the tune of $80,000.00 USD.

“People be careful, please…I’m in a terrible situation now because I have no other assets at this point. That was life savings.” -Ricky Smith, victim of cryptocurrency scam

Here’s what happened:

In May 2022, Ricky Smith was first contacted on Facebook by an unknown individual, regarding an investment opportunity, and he then communicated with a woman on WhatsApp. She directed him to begin investing into cryptocurrency on a website.

Ricky says in hindsight, it was not a legitimate cryptocurrency site. He thought it was real in the beginning, but his money began to disappear behind the scenes.

“So I decided to try it,” he said. “I said, ‘Okay I’ll try it just to test the water’ and I’ll put $500 in there at first and see what happens, you know? And when I put $500 in there, there was a gain, and I was able to get it out. But the more I kept putting in and I was gaining, I didn’t really just take it right back out.” -Ricky Smith, victim of cryptocurrency scam

(Source: CBS News 42)

As the website continued to show Ricky his crypto gains on his investment, it was all smoke and mirrors. He never tried to withdraw his money in the beginning, because it was doing so great.

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Zack Love

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