'I Feel So Stupid' - 67-year-old Facing Retirement With $80k Lost To Scammers

Tuesday, 24 December 2024, 6:13 pm
Article: RNZ

Susan Edmunds, Money Correspondent

For Anne, the psychological blow of having been caught up in an investment scam is proving harder to deal with than the at least-$80,000 she has lost.

"I feel so stupid," she says.

The 67-year-old, whom RNZ has agreed not to identify because not even her husband knows the full extent of her losses, fell into the scam last year.

She was talking to friends about being interested in investing in shares and a man told her he had got into trading, and recommended a company that could help.

"I went online, they had a website, all the legal terms and conditions, it looked pretty legit, so I thought I'll just give it a go."

For a few months, she invested a couple of hundred dollars, which did well. That prompted representatives for the company to push her for $1000. "They go 'if you give us $1000 we can give you some bonus shares'… it grew."

She was then convinced to sign up for a 12-month contract to invest on a regular basis.

"I could see what was happening. Some things went up, some things went down and I thought 'if it's a scam it's unlikely they'll go down'. It got bigger and bigger, $1000 became $5000 and it was in American dollars so you double it - I thought 'this looks really good'."

She and her husband were in a reasonable financial position for retirement. She was earning "pretty good money", they had some investments and their mortgage was almost paid off. "I could see it growing."

But late last year she suffered a serious accident that meant she had to stop working.

After she had been in hospital three weeks, the "investment" provider phoned to ask why she had not put any more money in to her account.

"I said no, at the moment I'm in hospital, so I won't be…. They said 'in your agreement you said you would give us so much money each month and we invested on the assumption you would do that. Now you owe us $25,000'. I said 'I beg your pardon?'"

She said she tried to tell them to take the money from her account and pay her out the rest but they refused.

She talked to her financial adviser who "tore her apart", she said.

She also sought advice from a lawyer who told her she had lost her money in a scam.

She said it was now a stalemate where she avoided calls from the scammers, who were claiming she had US$200,000 in her account - if only she would hand over another US$25,000.

"I'm not going to do that. I would have given them probably about $80,000.

"You see things growing and you think 'wow, this could make a major difference in retirement. The people I was talking to were really nice, they seemed really nice, it all seems really genuine until you try to get the money out."

Her financial adviser, Carey Church, said the amount she lost could be more. Church was not aware of what was happening initially because Anne was pulling money from her KiwiSaver to invest.

The provider had threatened to sue her and even asked her to go to her bank for a letter explaining why she could not remortgage her house to pay them.

Anne pushed the friend who had made the recommendation to tell her about his experience. "He said I should have told you earlier but I felt dreadful. That's what happens. People get caught into these things. It's hard to say to someone 'I've been had', you don't think you're stupid enough to be caught."

Because the "investment" provider was registered overseas, there was little she could do to try to get her money back.

She said she had had her own business and thought she was fairly savvy. "Where things look right you go 'well why not" but very quickly it can get out of hand.

"It makes you feel sick. But also annoyed enough that I want other people to have the opportunity to learn a bit from how easily these things do happen. I'm 67, we were cruising to a not-wealthy but comfortable retirement, thanks a lot to using good quality financial advice, just leaving them to it …Now I've got interest to pay ion a mortgage. It's so stupid, so, so stupid.

"Because I felt so stupid about it, I've always looked after the finances in the house - I haven't in the last 12 months told my husband the extent - he knows what's happened, he just doesn't know the extent of it.

"I'm not going to tell him. From being a very relationship where you thought you were telling each other everything… you feel so stupid and sick about what you've done."

She said the financial impact could eventually be put behind her, though they were paying for it. "It's the feeling that having always considered myself to be relatively intelligent with common sense."

Church said people needed to be wary of chasing investment scams offering returns that were too good to be true.

Earlier in the year, data from Payments NZ showed $194,269,962 was lost due in the year to the end of September, according to 11 of New Zealand's largest financial institutions.

"While it is great to see that figure fall slightly compared 2022/23, the fact that it is still high just proves scammers keep evolving to become more complex," said MBIE business specialist Ian Caplin.

"We are working to help New Zealanders learn what scams look like, as we know how hard it can be to identify them."

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