by Boris Wiedenfeld-Needham

The look on the young woman’s face was one of pure terror. “Hang up the phone,” I said to her calmly. “I…  I can’t.” Long pause. “Can you?” she said, holding her phone out to me, her hands shaking almost uncontrollably. I ended the call, and she immediately hugged me and started sobbing.

The majority of people that the cyber-scammers target are older folks, but I’ve seen just about every age group being affected by now. You see, we have a Bitcoin ATM in our business. These ATMs let you purchase Bitcoin, but you can’t trade them back for dollars there. The fee they charge is several times what you would pay on a major platform like Coinbase, Binance, etc.

So, who uses these ATMs and why? Mostly two groups: Some old-timey Eugene folks who sell a commodity that has long been legalized here, but don’t want to jump through the bureaucratic hoops. I have no problems with them, and we know who they are. 

But most of all, it’s people who have fallen for a scam. If I consider myself an ethical Eugenean, why on Earth would I have this machine? 

Let me explain.

Just a half hour before writing this piece, I stopped a lovely older gentleman from throwing away $26,000 of his life savings to “evade arrest.” As I am writing this, there is a lady depositing thousands into the machine, because no matter how much I tried, she wouldn’t believe me that she’s not investing money for her son. That breaks my heart a little bit, but I would say on average, we manage to turn away 90 percent of potential victims.

That is exactly why we have this here at my store, Bo’s Wine Depot and Liquor in the South Hills. If we didn’t have it, it would be somewhere else, where maybe nobody would care. 

I am far from the hero here, that would be curt (yes, he doesn’t capitalize his name), who works here five days a week. He calmly and patiently talks people down from throwing away all they have, day after day. We don’t keep an exact tab, but my total is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars that didn’t go to the scammers, and curt’s must be well over a million by now. 

He doesn’t do this in hope for any reward. Once in a while, someone comes back and gives him a coffee gift card, or even some money, for saving them from throwing away all they have, but most people are too ashamed of being had that they never come back. The reason he does it is because he is a good person and he gets angry when he sees vulnerable people being preyed upon. For me, the many hugs I’ve gotten alone are more than enough reward.

These scammers come at you from different angles, and believe me, they are very good and convincing. They may have a lot of information about you, like your name, address, name of your spouse and kids, and maybe even the last four digits of your social security number. They know where you bank and other details that sound very convincing. They may text you very official looking arrest warrants, etc., with your name on them.

Don’t believe it.

One of the most common scams they pull is threatening you with arrest. They pretend to be from the Lane County Sheriff’s office, and they spoof the phone number so that it looks to be the real deal. They will claim you missed jury duty, or that you have unpaid tickets, etc. They even often even tell you to drive to the Sheriff’s Office, but then just as you get there, they tell you that it’s too late, and you have to pay in Bitcoin to avoid arrest. That was, of course, always the plan.

Lately, we’ve also seen a lot of scams where they claim to be from your bank and that your account was hacked and you need to take it all out in cash and deposit it in this Bitcoin ATM to keep it safe. Pretty ironic, given where the money is going.

Another one we see frequently is the long-distance romance scam. Do you ever get texts that seem to be directed at the wrong person? “Hey Melissa, do you want to go play golf tomorrow?” or “I found your number on my old phone. Remind me who this is”? 

Yep, these are all scammers. They just casually strike up a conversation with you. They know full well who you are, but they pretend they don’t know. Before you know it, it turns into something romantic, so that you trust them explicitly. Of course, you can’t meet them because they are on the other side of the country, but “very soon.” 

In reality, you are most likely “chatting” with a man in a large corporate call center in Myanmar or other parts of Southeast Asia. These are giant operations, mostly run by organized crime cartels, often using what amounts to slave labor to do their bidding.

Then your new “girlfriend” starts telling you about how much she makes with investments. They are patient and play it slowly. Eventually, they will give you a hot tip on an investment. Often, they send you to a very legitimate looking, but completely fake cryptocurrency website. If you have Norton or similar anti-malware installed, it probably won’t let you go there. 

In that case, they tell you to take money out of your bank account and deposit it in a Bitcoin ATM like ours. That’s where we step in. People want to believe this so badly, they try to convince themselves. I try to involve them in conversation. “Oh, your ‘girlfriend’ has a hot tip! Have you ever met her in person? Ah. Do you have a picture of her?” 

That’s when I sometimes have to be the party pooper and point out reality. “How old are you? 76? Retired, living in Eugene? The gorgeous Asian woman in the pictures, supposedly a successful investment broker in NYC, is maybe 26, but she fell head-over-heels for a retired teacher in Eugene. Let me ask you this? If I told you that this was my girlfriend, would you believe me?” 

But for some people, they want to believe it so badly that even we can’t stop them.

High tech makes this more and more scary every month. People have been getting voicemails and video messages, even real-time conversations from their kids or grandkids. But these are not real — they are deep-fakes — AI-generated. They look and sound exactly like your loved one, which is scary. In these instances, they are usually “in trouble with the law” or have this “absolutely can’t-miss insider tip” on an investment. 

Once you put money in the machine, you’d have a better chance of recovering it after flushing it down the toilet than any other way to get it back. That money is in an offshore account in less than a second, and it can never be recovered. You can’t sue the makers or operators of the machine either, because they don’t have your money, they just take their fee and send it on to the address that you specified.

Here are some takeaways from this to keep yourself and especially older family and friends safe:

• No law enforcement agency, not the IRS or any government agency, would ever take payment in Bitcoin, period. If you get a call from, say the Lane County Sheriff’s Office, asking you to make payment, hang up the phone, look up their number and call them.

• Never send cryptocurrency to anyone you don’t know and have not met in person. Do not fall for any online romance scams, as alluring as they may sound. If it seems to be too good to be true, it is.

• If a relative or friend messages you about having an emergency and needing funds, call them on a number you know.

Remember that these are anything but amateurs, they are sophisticated criminal organizations. They are very good at what they do, and they can be very convincing. One trademark that you can always count on is that they won’t let you hang up the phone. They will tell you if you hang up the phone, it’s too late, and you’ll be arrested, your loved one will die, etc. They will try to bully and intimidate you.

They can’t and won’t hurt you — they are halfway around the world from you. They have threatened to come for me and kill me many times for ruining their scam, and I know it’s a bluff.

If you have any question about the legitimacy of anything that could be a scam, call the Eugene Police Department non-emergency line at 541-682-5111.

Please share this information with anyone you think might be vulnerable. Most of our parents had to have “that talk” with us when we entered puberty. Maybe now it’s time for us to have another kind of talk with our parents and elders.

And if curt saved you from flushing your future down the virtual toilet, you don’t have to be embarrassed, and you don’t have to give him a reward. Maybe just come back in when you’re not so freaked out and shake his hand and thank him. He is truly one of this city’s unsung heroes.

Boris Wiedenfeld-Needham owns and operates Bo’s Wine Depot and Liquor and organizes with Indivisible Eugene Springfield.