CAPE CORAL, Fla. \u2014 A Cape Coral woman said she lost nearly $20,000 after falling victim to an elaborate phone scam that led her to deposit money into a Bitcoin machine at a local gas station.<\/p>\n
Fox 4’s Bella Line spoke with the woman first:<\/p>\n
Cape Coral woman says she lost nearly $20,000 in elaborate phone scam involving Bitcoin machine<\/p>\n
Vicky Cotton’s husband called FOX 4 after the incident, which Cape Coral police said is becoming increasingly common in the area.<\/p>\n
Cotton said the scam began with a notification on her phone telling her to call Apple support. Instead, someone named “Kevin” called her directly.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t even think that’s gonna be happen to me,” Cotton said.<\/p>\n
Cotton said Kevin told her that hackers were after her money and she needed to withdraw $20,000 to keep it safe.<\/p>\n
“He said, “The only you can do, you have to withdraw the money in the bank, and we can deposit somewhere else that they cannot trace your money,'” Cotton said.<\/p>\n
For nearly five hours, Cotton said Kevin controlled her every move. First, he directed her to drive to multiple Suncoast Credit Union locations to withdraw the money, then to a gas station to put the cash into a Bitcoin machine.<\/p>\n
Cotton said Kevin sent her QR codes to deposit $17,350 into a Bitcoin machine at the gas station.<\/p>\n
“I said, ‘No, I’m scared. I don’t want to do this thing.’ [He said] ‘No, you have to do it. You need your money to deposit the money right away,'” Cotton said.<\/p>\n
The scam continued when Cotton said Kevin had her drive to Lowe’s to purchase $2,000 worth of Apple gift cards.<\/p>\n
“You hurry up, because we need, we had time to finish this,” Cotton said Kevin told her.<\/p>\n
After Cotton sent pictures of the gift cards to Kevin, she said the phone went silent. He hung up and she said she has not heard from him since.<\/p>\n
Cape Coral police are investigating Cotton’s case and said she is not the only victim.<\/p>\n
“We’ve had a lot of people who have either made reports of someone tried to scam me in a similar type of way, we’ve had plenty of people who have fallen for these types of scams as well,” said Lisa Greenberg, Cape Coral Police public affairs officer.<\/p>\n
Cotton said they are fighting to get the money back.<\/p>\n
“Don’t trust to anybody in the phone,” Cotton said.<\/p>\n
Fox 4’s Bella Line reached out to the Bitcoin company for information but have not heard back yet.<\/p>\n
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CAPE CORAL, Fla. \u2014 A Cape Coral woman said she lost nearly $20,000 after falling victim to an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80282,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[44802,3862,8069,209,263,211,210,22687,264,1288,11176,44803,4294],"class_list":["post-80281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-athena-bitcoin-machine","tag-bella-line","tag-bitcoin","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-florida","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-crypto","tag-fox-4","tag-gas-station","tag-scam","tag-vicky-cotton","tag-wftx"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}