PARMA, Ohio – Olympia and Steve Kallman of Parma said they faced several sleepless nights after police reported they stole more than $ 22,000 from scammers from their Coinbase virtual cryptocurrency wallet on Aug. 16 .
Steve Kallaman told News 5 that he has unfortunately allowed a woman posing as a Coinbase employee on the phone to have remote access to the family computer and to transfer the money to another account that has not yet been found.
Olympia Kallman has reached out to the Parma Police Department, the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission and the Attorney General’s offices in Ohio and California to find those responsible for this fraud.
“I’ve been working feverishly on it, day after day, sleep is obviously no longer a priority,” said Kallman.
“So he gave her permission and gave her the information she had requested so that she could access the account. The next day our funds were gone, around 22,600 US dollars were completely destroyed. “
“We tried to trace the phone numbers used, but all other numbers I had reached that were in this operation were disconnected. Seems like they have start-up numbers, they do every job and they separate them. “
Steve Kallman said the caller appeared legitimate because she knew about a purchase they were trying to make and even had the audacity to ask for an additional $ 5,000 to $ 3,000 to sort the situation out.
“Our hearts sank to the ground and we couldn’t get in because they locked us out of our account,” said Kallman.
“You are so afraid of losing a lot of money. (4 sec.) That you are almost ready to do something stupid for her. ”
The Kallman’s told News 5 that they were having trouble getting in touch with legitimate Coinbase customer service reps regarding this fraud case.
Ericka Dilworth, Cleveland Better Business Bureau’s director of operations, told News 5 that consumers should never give personal information or remote access to a caller. Consumers should hang up, look up and verify the company number, and contact the company directly to verify the authenticity of the caller.
“Don’t give them remote access over the phone, you give them access to everything on your computer,” Dilworth said. “You can only trust a phone call if you made it yourself. But when you get the call, you should never give out any personal information over the phone because you just can’t trust who it is. “
Dilworth said consumers need to understand a cryptocurrency exchange company’s safety, contact and refund policies before investing any money.
“What is the company’s responsibility, what kind of extensive protocols are in place, and if you need your money back, how do you do them,” said Dilworth.
“You can’t trust Caller ID, even if it’s a call from your bank and the bank asks you to check your passwords, why should they do that, they already have all this information about you.”
News 5 contacted Coinbase headquarters about the case and the company immediately responded with the following statement:
Thank you for letting us know. We passed this on to our support team to help out with the Kallmans. Our goal is to be the most trusted crypto platform and our security team is investing heavily to protect our 68+ million users from Account Takeovers (ATOs).
As a result of these protective efforts, only a few customers (less than 0.01%) are affected by account takeovers. In the rare event that a customer notices a potential account takeover, we offer multiple channels [help.coinbase.com] so that customers can quickly and easily block their account so that no further unauthorized activities can take place.
We have also begun introducing phone support for ATOs to provide customers with a live agent to initiate an investigation: 888 908-7930.
More details on this blog:
https://blog.coinbase.com/continuing-our-commitment-to-customers-introducing-phone-support-for-atos-c9ca788bf85 [blog.coinbase.com]
Joe Pagonakis
Olympia Kallman, meanwhile, has only forgiveness for her husband’s phone mistake and believes their strong bond will help them fight for a solution to this fraud case.
“I’m doing everything I can to survive this emotionally so that we can get on with our lives,” said Kallman. “Of course I love him very much, even if he hasn’t listened to my intuition, if someone asks about it, don’t do it.”
source https://www.bisayanews.com/2021/09/15/parma-couple-loses-22000-warns-about-cryptocurrency-buys/
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