Marrisa, writer
- Investment scam survivor
When single mother Marissa* started online dating, she was putting her life together after a turbulent struggle with her mental health. Sammy fit the bill of the no-strings-attached online fun she needed to occasionally escape the challenges of her daily life.
But within weeks, Marissa had emptied her bank account in an investment scheme Sammy promised could ease her financial burden. How did this happen? This is Marissa’s story as told to AIDILA RAZAK.
I had been using a dating app for a few days when I matched with this guy, Sammy. He messaged me first. It was pretty typical, something about wanting to get to know me better.
The dating app only allowed matches for people within a certain radius and mine was in Malaysia so I assumed he was Malaysian or at least based here. But he said he was actually from Hong Kong and looking to visit Malaysia soon.
Within a couple of days, we moved our chat to Telegram.
My profile states that I am a single mother looking to mingle. I wasn’t in the mindset of looking for someone to settle down with, just something light and fun.
It was in November and he told me that he was coming to Malaysia on Dec 13 - he gave a specific date - and wanted recommendations of where to go. He was visiting Malacca and KL.
He told me he was a photographer and shared with me photos that he said he took of the Tsim Sha Tsui district in Hong Kong. It all seemed quite legitimate.
We mostly talked about his travel plans but soon we started sexting.
Often when we chatted, he would say “Don’t mind me, I’m busy looking at forex markets”. He was planting this idea that he was some sort of investor.
He didn’t elaborate until I asked what he was investing in. He said: “I’m just earning money on the side while waiting for clients to come.”
Then he started sharing screenshots to show how much he earned that day through the investment scheme he was part of. The screenshots were from a website and it showed his transactions - what he put in that day and what he earned.
He knew I was in debt and struggling financially as a single mother. He started to offer to teach me how to invest, as a way to help me out. But he wasn’t pushy. He only shared the link to the website, Global Exabit, when I finally asked him how it worked.
The website looked legitimate. To make an investor account, I even had to complete an e-Know Your Customer (eKYC) process by taking a photograph with my identity card.
To start investing in this website you must first chat with the online guest officer on the website to say you want to transact an amount of money. I asked Sammy how much I should start with because I don’t have a lot, and he suggested 150 in USDT.
The guest officer would communicate via a chat box on the website. They told me to put in USDT150. I had to transfer it to a particular bank account, which was a Malaysian bank account.
The name of the company which held the account was Top Gear Global*. I tried to search for it online before I transacted but I couldn’t find anything.
The guest officer also instructed me to only put my name in the transaction reference and not make any mention of USDT or Bitcoin. It was suspicious but I went with it. I transacted that amount and true enough the USDT150 appeared on my account on the website.
Sammy started to teach me to invest in that website. On the website, I could see the trendline for cryptocurrency exchange going up and down.
He told me that the amount of time I keep the money in the account would determine how much I can get. If I invest for 60 seconds, the return is 10 percent. If I invest for 120 seconds then my returns would be 30 percent and so on. If I invest for three days it would be 300 percent!
With the exchange rate being RM4.80 to USDT1, I had to put in RM800 to follow Sammy’s advice. Following his instructions, I immediately saw my returns.
He coached me - told me what to do, what to click and when. He told me to check how my investment was doing and if the transaction went through.
But truly, I didn’t understand what I was looking at. I was just listening to him and following his instructions.
From the USDT150 that I put in, I used USDT50 to buy the cryptocurrency and waited 60 seconds, which was what you had to invest.
From there, I got back USDT5. It matched the described returns of 10 percent for 60 seconds, so I thought that’s how you earn from Bitcoin investments.
But it was just numbers on the screen. Nothing was banked into my actual bank account.
To check if the numbers were real, I tried to withdraw the funds. When I did, I got an error message from Hong Leong Bank, saying it rejected the transaction because the bank couldn’t verify where it came from.
I asked Sammy, “Why is it saying this? Is this investment website legit?” He said there must be something wrong with my bank account.
So then I tried my account in another bank, and the money came through. The cash didn’t come from Top Gear Global but from another company which I couldn’t find online.Despite this, I became more convinced that the scheme was legitimate when I got my money back.
The very next day, Sammy asked me to put in more cash and I put in USDT800 (RM3,840). It was my entire salary for the month and all I had. And yet, he pushed me to put in even more.
The way the investments were set up is that the longer you keep your money in the scheme, the higher the return. And each tier has a minimum that you can put in.
Sammy wanted me to leave my cash for 36 hours, as opposed to just 60 seconds previously. By leaving my money in there for a few hours, I would get 120 percent in returns. But the minimum investment for this was USDT5,000. Clearly, my USDT800 wasn’t enough.
Sammy said he would help me out by loaning me USDT2,000. It appeared in my investment account on the website. So now I had USDT2,800, still far away from the minimum investment of USDT5,000. So he started suggesting and then badgering me to borrow money from friends so I could have enough to meet that threshold.
That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Borrow money? I told him I was already in debt, so why would anyone lend me money? He also knew that I was already in a programme to manage my debt. It was a major red flag.
While all this was happening, I was furiously trying to read up about cryptocurrency investments and to see if this was a scam. Finally, I found a news article where potential investors were advised to look up account numbers on the police’s Semak Mule portal. I never knew this portal existed.
I checked the Top Gear Global bank account, and it showed up in Semak Mule. It even showed that there were three police reports lodged over this account being a mule account, and yet it was still transacting.
I started to panic then. That USDT800 I put in was my hard-earned money, my entire salary and I depended on that entirely for my household expenses.
When it was clear I wasn’t going to borrow money from friends or family, Sammy became angry. He was pushing me to return the USDT2,000 he loaned me. I offered to just transfer it back to his investment account and tried to, but the transaction failed.
He told me transfers between two USDT accounts were not allowed. The only way to pay him back was to make a withdrawal and transfer the money to him from my bank account.
I tried withdrawing the entire sum of USDT2,800, but that transaction failed too. The guest officer told me that to do so, I needed to invest first.
I told Sammy, “If you want the money so badly, let’s put the entire USDT2,800 into a lower threshold investment scheme for lower returns.” That way I could withdraw the entire sum after that and return the amount he put in. But he refused. He claimed he doesn’t “play risky games”.
Suspicious, I told him he needed to show me proof that he had indeed transferred the equivalent into my account and he gave me a screenshot of some e-wallet transaction that didn’t make sense.
By this time, Sammy already had my phone number, address, and even intimate photos of me. The website also had my IC from the eKYC process.
So when I refused to transfer money to him, he started threatening my family, telling me he could find and kill them. At that point, I started telling close friends about the situation and shared the website details. My friends found that the website was created just 10 days before I joined the scheme.
When I asked Sammy how long he had been investing there, he said three years. Things were unravelling.
I was really scared. I have a young child and here he was repeatedly telling me he can send people to kill us. So I was trying hard to contain whatever damage to just me and not let anyone in my family know.
In the end, they still found out.
I struggle with mental health issues and I was putting my life back together again when I started chatting with Sammy. So when this happened, I went into a tailspin. I was screaming all around the house and I was violent - I broke a window in a fit of rage.
Just several weeks before I met Sammy, I had attempted suicide. I survived, but at this point, I felt like I should have died. That was what I told my mother - I should have died then so this wouldn’t have happened. It was pretty traumatic.
I feel my family was quite calm about what happened. They were initially worried about the death threat but decided it didn’t seem credible. They also gave me some money so I could survive.
When I initially wanted to keep it a secret, it was because I didn’t want to be seen as a weakling or a failure for falling into this. I didn’t want my family to think that I could not be trusted with my own money. As it is, I am already a burden to them because of my mental health struggles.
But since then, I felt I needed to tell my family everything so they could trust me again. They didn’t ask me to do so, but it was implied. My sister has since also asked me to transfer my salary to her for safekeeping. It’s demoralising.
At the end of the day, I am proud of myself for having plucked up the courage to lodge a police report about what had happened and to be upfront about it with my family.
Since the scam happened, I’ve been going to the website to see if it’s still there and it is still operating. People can still create accounts and log into it, but my credentials are gone.
Police have not gotten back to me and I don’t expect to see the money again. Others lost hundreds of thousands of ringgit and I only lost a few thousands. I’m glad I got out early, but it was still a whole month’s salary.
I also sometimes think about how the scammer has my intimate pictures and videos. My theory is that they will probably use them to scam others, just as I was sent intimate photos and videos of Sammy.
Police told me, “Well if it ever gets put on the internet you can always say they were AI-generated”. I’ve come to terms with it. I’m more angry that I had fallen for the scam and lost all that money.
I’ve since quit all the dating apps. I will not get on them again until I am more stable in my life.
In a way, I think I was targeted for what I put on my profile - a single mother - and then whatever I shared about being in debt made it worse.
When I look back, what I did and what happened doesn’t make sense to me. Half of me knew it was a scam, yet the other half jumped into it and played along. I still ask myself, “Why did I do this?”
I’ve not fully given up on finding love or company, but everything is in person these days, no longer online.
If you ask me what I would say to someone who just experienced what I did, my advice is - don’t lose hope. You will survive, you can carry on.
*Editor’s Note: Scam survivors' names have been changed to respect their privacy and to avoid prevailing stigma against them.
If you’re feeling distressed, depressed or suicidal, seek help from a health professional or call the Befrienders emotional support hotline at 603-76272929.
If you feel that you may have been scammed, contact the National Scam Response Centre’s hotline at 997 for help.
Malaysiakini’s checks found that since Marissa was targeted, at least another eight police reports have been lodged against the bank account registered to Top Gear Global.
Top Gear Global is a sole proprietorship which started operating days before Marissa made the first transaction. As of Jan 26, the investment website, company and bank account used to receive Marrisa’s funds are still active and accessible. Checks at the time of publication, four months after Marissa’s police report, found both the website and bank account have been suspended.
Share our story
Published by Kini News Lab on Feb 26, 2024.
Kini News Lab
