


"So, then I go look on the FBI site and lo and behold, there's this public alert about this type of scam," Belcher said. When he asked them to take it out of his "$8 million balance," they refused. The app wanted $1.5 million from Belcher, threatening to freeze his account if he didn't pay up. A "customer service agent" with the app said "you need to repay the loan before you can withdraw cash from your account." It appeared to be the best decision of his life until he attempted to withdraw the money. "My balance at the end of the investment plan is over 8 million USDT on the platform," Belcher said. "I start transferring money out of my retirement accounts to this platform," Belcher said. "Then, I withdrew the cryptocurrency, and it all seemed to work seamlessly," he said. "It made sense to me."īelcher deposited small amounts of cryptocurrency into the app, and Suzuki told him when to "buy long or buy short." Each time, he would "make" some money. "The rationale: Small changes in Bitcoin are large changes in USDT," Belcher said. Suzuki convinced him to invest heavily in the volatility of Bitcoin on the app. "I registered and it looked like a legitimate site, was good software."
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"The conversation led to she invests on this platform that has both a mobile app and a web app that she directed me to go sign up for my own account," Belcher said.īelcher, the software engineer himself, signed up and everything checked out. "I missed out on Google, I missed out on Apple, so I didn't want to miss out on this trend," Belcher said.īelcher has made about $70,000 in the few years he's been invested in cryptocurrency, and he said Suzuki told him she, too, has made a mint. Eventually, they'd talk about cryptocurrency, a decentralized currency with a widely fluctuating value that reached more than $3 trillion at one point in 2021. The two clicked instantly, messaging for several weeks, but never meeting in person.

"I met Shikuka Suzuki, who also lived in Denver, and was interested in a lot of the same things," Belcher said. "I always thought 'I'll never fall for something like that,'" Belcher said in an exclusive interview with Denver7.īut just a few months after moving to Denver to be closer to his children, Belcher would fall for a woman on a dating app. DENVER - It appeared as if retirement would come early for 52-year-old Denverite Steve Belcher, but the millions he thought he made in November by investing in cryptocurrency turned out to be a lie.īelcher would be one of the thousands who'd fall to a new cryptocurrency scam, which has recently been sweeping through the United States, according to the FBI.
