Doug and Victoria Lloyd are left searching for answers after the retired couple received $177,023 through a line of credit.
It all started with an online video of what appeared to be Elon Musk promoting a new investment opportunity.
The Lloyds followed a link in the video description and submitted their phone number to a website that promised significant financial returns.
โAt first it was exciting. I thought, wow, there's something new you can invest in and you'd make money and maybe we could get our dream house,โ Victoria Lloyd said.
โWe needed the money at that time. โWe needed to accumulate as much funds as we could.โ
However, the video was fake, made with deepfake technology. It was the beginning of a scam that would drastically change the Lloyds' lives forever.
It all started at the beginning of October, when they received a call from a man who claimed to work for an investment platform called 'Be the Bank'.
The man put them in touch with a "financial advisor" who convinced the Lloyds to send him a small sum to start Forex trading on his behalf.
โWe talked for hours every day for months. She always encouraged me and told me what to do,โ said Doug Lloyd.
โI built him like he was my best friend. Sometimes he told us about his wife and his dog.
After some time, the scammer convinced Mr. Lloyd to invest in cryptocurrencies and increase the sum he sent to maximize his profits.
"That's when things went up $10,000 that night, $20,000 we won the next night and that was when it was early," Mr. Lloyd said.
"I started telling my friends and they were all like 'oh, that's a scam.' Do not do that.' But it was so real. I mean, you could see everything online and we checked them through the best business bureau in England, and their website looked very legitimate.โ
Doug Lloyd suffered a serious motorcycle accident when he was 20 years old that left him hemiplegic. With limited mobility, he now has difficulty working on a computer.
The scammer recognized this and pressured the couple to grant him access to remotely control their laptop to speed up the process.
I was checking Mr. Lloyd's emails and even his bank account and it seemed to be working fine.
By late November, the Lloyds say their account had grown to about $500,000 in value, but when Mr. Lloyd tried to withdraw $350,000, the man they had been speaking to changed his tune.
โHe always had an answer for everything, until he got angry,โ Lloyd said.
In voicemails sent to CTV News, the scammer is heard pressuring the couple, saying they were "making the biggest mistake of their lives" and warning them "not to fall for any type of scam from other people saying they are calling from an apartment." of fraud". .โ
The Lloyds have since filed a police report with the Ottawa Police Service and alerted Scotiabank.
However, police say the chances of them being able to get their money back are slim.
The bank told them its investigation found no clear evidence of fraud on the couple's ScotiaCard.
"Scotiabank cannot comment on the details of individual customer situations for privacy reasons," Scotiabank said in a statement to CTV News.
โRecognizing that fraud is an ever-present risk in financial services and other industries and is an ever-evolving threat here in Canada and around the world, we continue to update information and work with industry partners to raise awareness. We also encourage all customers to practice safe banking habits and do their part to help recognize, reject and report fraud. For resources and advice, customers can visit https://www.scotiabank.com/security".
The couple now faces a mountain of debt on their line of credit that they planned to use to create their dream home.
โWe were trying to build a house so we wouldn't have to go to a retirement home and could live there for the rest of our lives,โ Mrs. Lloyd said.
โBut they took him away. It's just devastating. All our dreams are gone. I wouldn't want this to happen to anyone else. It's not fair. We worked all our lives and you are planning your future, your life but everything is over. We might even lose this house. โThey just took it away from us.โ
In 2023, there were 3,631 victims who were deceived by similar scams, losing a combined $309 million, according to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Center.
Specifically in Ontario, 1,209 victims were scammed out of approximately $111 million.
