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Suffolk Police detectives raced to a Centereach coin store Wednesday and stopped a Hauppauge man from handing over $466,000 in gold bars to scammers posing as federal agents.
The 69-year-old victim got a pop-up notification on his computer and called the number listed in the message, police said. The people on the call claimed to be federal agents and warned him that his financial accounts were in a vulnerable state.
The scammer then advised the man to buy gold and send it to them so that they could help “secure” his money. The victim followed through and withdrew the funds from his IRA retirement account to pay for the gold, police said.
A fraud investigator at his bank flagged the unusually large withdrawal and alerted Financial Crimes Unit detectives that the money was being wired to a gold dealer. Detectives rushed to the Centereach store and intercepted the man as he was in the process of buying approximately $466,000 in gold bars, according to police.
No arrests have been announced and the investigation is ongoing, police said.
Detectives are asking anyone who believes they’ve been targeted by a similar scam, or anyone with information, to call Suffolk Police’s Financial Crimes Unit at 631.852.6821.
Top: Gold bars (photo by Jingming Pan) and blurred background (photo by Cheung Gnaiq).
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