A Scottish cancer victim has said he had been scammed out of a chunk of his savings in an intricate cryptocurrency scam.
Tom Roberts, 66, was left shocked and upset when he lost £10,000 of his retirement fund through the scam and is now speaking out to warn others against investing in the scheme, reports the Daily Record.
The OAP said: "It is embarrassing – you don’t want to tell anyone because they will think you are an idiot but this is all in hindsight. These people have to be stopped.
READ MORE: Edinburgh police officers 'assaulted' after 'concern for young person' on bus
"I want to expose this company and make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else."
The man, from Kirkcaldy, is just one in a group of around 30 people who claim to have been duped by the alleged scam run by Safe Holdings - a company registered in the Carribbean.
The company claims to use modern trading software to analyse the cryptocurrency market, and make profitable investments.
Former oil worker Tom has claimed that he has lost his retirement savings when investing with the company - and has dealt with the fallout while undergoing chemotherapy for high-grade lymphoma.
The OAP had invested £16,000 over the course of four months in 2021 and 2022 after his friend recommended it. The pal was seeing a profit of around £300 a week - but now Tom claims to have lost £10,000.
Tom – and many others – have mainly dealt with a man named Chris O’Brien, who is understood to run the company and communicates with clients using the WhatsApp messaging service.
Tom told the Record: "I initially invested £1,000 but I was being asked to invest more and because it looked so good, I did.
"I invested a total of £16,000. In September, I asked for £10,000 and I have been asking for it since.
"It has been pending for eight months. I realised something was wrong when I couldn’t get the money out.
"I was diagnosed with cancer during all of this and I even told Chris I was dying but it didn’t make any difference. I was just ignored.
"It was really stressful going through cancer treatment and dealing with all this. It has been hard, it is all the money I had left and now it is gone.
"My wife has Huntington’s disease and we wanted to go on the holiday of a lifetime so that money would have done a great deal for us."
Tom, who has a 16-month-old grandchild, had managed to withdraw £6,000 from his account in between depositing cash and asking for his £10,000 back.
His balance at the time said he had £99,000. Tom now claims that he has been fenced off with excuses at every turn when asking for the money -and says he was simply ignored when he asked for updates.
Alan Gow, a lorry driver from Perth, was also convinced to join the scheme by a friend, and withdrew money from his pension to a total of £12,000 over six months in 2021 and 2022.
The 57-year-old has managed to recoup £8,5000 back after hounding the company for payments, but he claims these monthly instalments were always late, and often short.
He claims to have lost a total of £3500 despite his account saying he had a balance of £77,022. He told the Record: "No one is getting any money out of this guy (Chris). It is just numbers on a screen.
"The first £5,000 I invested was out of my pension after a work colleague showed me the profit he had been making and the money he had taken out.
"I realised something was wrong when I was met with constant excuses when I tried to withdraw £8,500.
"This went on for months with no solid excuse as to why I couldn’t withdraw my money. I spoke to Chris and said I wanted a monthly dividend payment if I couldn’t get the lump sum.
"It took about three weeks to get my first payment of £1,500 then every payment after was late. I managed to get £8,500 back and now I’m being ignored.
"I am absolutely fuming about it. I want to warn other people against investing as it is a scam. Everything they tell you is a lie."
The scheme is balanced on word of mouth, counting on investors who have received a profit to refer their friends and family to set up accounts.
Chris then gets in touch on WhatsApp to confirm an investment and asks users to set up an account with Starling Bank and transfer cash.
From there, the money is then transferred into a cryptocurrency bank account, an authenticator app is used, which in turn allows Safe Holdings to take the money out to “trade” with it.
Users then watch the progress of their money in an online account, with the numbers on the scene always showing a huge profit.
The Record spoke to other Scots who did not want to be named but all claimed to have been “scammed”. A social media group with about 30 investors has been set up, with all claiming to have trouble withdrawing cash.
Safe Holdings is an Offshore Ltd company, likely based within the Virgin Isles, and registered at an address in the Grenadines – which leaves Police Scotland with no relevant powers or authority to investigate the alleged fraud, as it is out with their jurisdiction.
The same address Safe Holdings has used has been linked to scam broker businesses in the past.
The website used by the company was initially safe-holdings.com but on May 1, the website was closed.
It was alleged that the website shut down due to reports of fraud, but O’Brien told investors the site being updated. The website has now been changed to safe-holdings.co.uk.
The business is not registered with Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK, and any firm carrying out a regulated activity or cryptoasset services that come within the scope of laundering rules must be authorised by this regulator.
The company also operates in Canada, Australia and Germany, but does not appear to be regulated in any of these countries either.
Trustpilot has been flooded with reviews from concerned investors all claiming to have been scammed.
The Record attempted to contact Chris from Safe Holdings a number of times but did not receive any response.
A spokesman for Starling Bank said: "We consider crypto activity to be high risk and we constantly review our position in relation to financial crime.
"In November, we made the decision to prevent all card and faster payments to crypto merchants, and implemented further restrictions on outgoing and incoming transfers.
"We can only restrict holding accounts used by crypto exchanges when we are made aware of them – there is no generic crypto exchange identifier."
READ NEXT:
Beyonce requests huge take away order for her entourage during Edinburgh stay
Famous DJ eyes up This Morning role after Phillip Schofield is axed from show
Scottish family desperately seek help as son diagnosed with terminal illness
Edinburgh weather: City set for 'mini-heatwave' with 20C temperatures
Edinburgh outdoor market's famous giant pink King Kong and where it is now
