{"id":90488,"date":"2026-01-19T00:41:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T00:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/90488\/"},"modified":"2026-01-19T00:41:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T00:41:07","slug":"new-jersey-man-sentenced-for-stealing-gold-cash-from-74-year-old-in-lehigh-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/90488\/","title":{"rendered":"New Jersey man sentenced for stealing gold, cash from 74-year-old in Lehigh Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"

A New Jersey man was sentenced to state prison for stealing more than $500,000 in gold and around $91,000 in cash<\/a> from a 74-year-old man in Lehigh County. <\/p>\n

Hirtik Hemchand Katri, 25, of Lawrence Township, pleaded guilty to felony theft charges and was sentenced to 12 to 36 months in prison and two years of probation. He was also ordered to pay $688,372 in restitution. <\/p>\n

The charges were based on a Feb. 3, 2025, report to Whitehall Township police. <\/p>\n

A 74-year-old man told police he was the victim of a lengthy scam that started with an email about a fraudulent PayPal charge. <\/p>\n

The man was told he was responsible for the error and had to go to a Bitcoin kiosk to repay PayPal. After the first scam, numerous other calls with the same theme came in, telling the man that if he didn\u2019t make the payments, he would be put in jail. <\/p>\n

The victim withdrew funds from his IRA and purchased more than 200 gold bars, which Khatri picked up at the victim\u2019s home. <\/p>\n

Police were able to identify Khatri by using a license plate reader to find the car he was driving when he picked up the gold. <\/p>\n

The Lehigh County Elder Abuse Task Force said it has seen a growing number of fraudulent scams. Older residents are more susceptible<\/a> to fraud because they have more savings and are easier to defraud when using new technologies like PayPal and Bitcoin. <\/p>\n

Police said people should be suspicious of anyone who contacts them by phone and asks for a large sum of money in any form. <\/p>\n

Anyone who asks for large amounts of funds, especially in methods like cryptocurrency, precious metals, gift cards, and cash is almost certainly part of a scam, police said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A New Jersey man was sentenced to state prison for stealing more than $500,000 in gold and around…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90489,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120],"class_list":{"0":"post-90488","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-allentown","8":"tag-allentown","9":"tag-allentown-headlines","10":"tag-allentown-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}