'Overnight, my whole life changed': Cybercrime victim who lost nearly $1M and lived in poverty gets it all back and more

After losing astir $1 cardinal to a tech-support scam and spending years scraping by connected Social Security, Vermont retiree Jeanette Voss has had a life-changing experience.

On Christmas Eve, the 71-year-old saw her stolen wealth reappear each astatine once, deposited straight into her slope relationship — with interest. The last tally? $1,033,000.

“Overnight, my full beingness changed,” she told New Hampshire Public Radio (1).

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For a transgression that typically leaves victims financially and emotionally shattered, the result was thing abbreviated of extraordinary.

Credit goes to United States Secret Service agents, who recovered Voss’s funds by tracking cryptocurrency wallets tied to an planetary scam ring.

While the betterment doesn’t erase years of accent and deprivation for Voss, it transformed what began arsenic a cautionary communicative into 1 of the uncommon feel-good endings successful the satellite of cybercrime.

Here’s what happened to her, and however to support yourself.

As the Vermont media outlet Seven Days reports, successful 2021, Voss saw what appeared to beryllium a morganatic tech-support alert popular up connected her laptop, saying it had been compromised. She called the fig connected the surface (2).

Scammers posing arsenic tech-support specialists convinced her that hackers had already stolen her Social Security fig and her fiscal accounts were astatine risk.

They instructed her to determination funds retired of her slope relationship into cryptocurrency for “security”. Scammers favour crypto transfers due to the fact that they’re fast, hard to hint and astir intolerable to reverse.

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Sadly, Voss transferred astir everything she had — $950,000. When she realized she’d been scammed, she contacted her fiscal advisor, the Social Security Administration and the police. But she eared she’d ne'er get her wealth back.

For implicit 4 years, Voss rationed her spending, avoided travel, flirted with taxation occupation and was forced to seldom stray from her home. All she had was Social Security and nutrient stamps.

Recovering mislaid wealth often takes years, and typically depends connected sustained practice with investigators, the quality to hint funds to identifiable accounts oregon wallets and immoderate disruption successful the criminals’ laundering oregon operational chain.