A 74-year-old Bethesda, Maryland, man was scammed out of more than $1 million he converted to gold bars and then unwittingly handed over to fraudsters, police in Montgomery County say.
It’s the latest example of what seems to be a growing trend of scams involving gold bars.
The alleged scammer, 52-year-old Vipul J. Thakkar, of Owings Mills, was arrested Wednesday after picking up the last payment of gold bars from the victim’s home, police said in a news release on Thursday. Thakkar has been charged with multiple counts of attempted theft and is being held without bond.
The scam started back in March when the Bethesda man received an email saying a suspicious deposit had been made into his bank account. He was instructed to convert his money into gold purportedly to protect his assets.
On 10 separate occasions, between March and June, the man purchased a total of over $1.1 million in gold bars and arranged to have the bars picked up by associates of the suspect, police said.
It wasn’t until the man made the final purchase of more than $240,000 in gold bars that he saw a local news report about an 82-year-old Montgomery County woman who had been scammed out of $900,000 in a similar scheme. He then contacted Montgomery County Police Department’s Financial Crimes Section.
On Wednesday, a Montgomery County detective communicated with the suspect, later identified as Thakkar, and arranged a pickup at the Bethesda man’s home. Posing as the victim, the detective handed a package to Thakkar who then got in a car and drove away.
Officers then stopped Thakkar and he was arrested.
Officials say the county is seeing more of these types of scams, often involving older people who are told to convert the money in their bank accounts into gold bars.
In the case of the 82-year-old woman, victimized earlier this month, police have arrested a 19-year-old New York City resident.
Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy told WTOP earlier this month there have been at least 17 victims of these types of scams in the county who have lost millions of dollars in total.
“There are people losing their life savings to this scam and it’s not just here in Montgomery County … it is across the country,” he added.
And it can be difficult to recover the money for the victims.
“The reality is, getting back those gold bars is very tough. … Are they in the country? Have they been melted down, changed into other forms? They are essentially not traceable,” McCarthy told WTOP.
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