TL; DR: the scammers impersonated the police over the phone but had
uniforms and badges, tried to arrest me for crimes I didn’t commit, and
got me to transfer them my savings because they needed my assets frozen,
threatened to harm my brother and par...
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TL; DR: the scammers impersonated the police over the phone but had
uniforms and badges, tried to arrest me for crimes I didn’t commit, and
got me to transfer them my savings because they needed my assets frozen,
threatened to harm my brother and partner if I didn’t do as they said. I
live in Australia and am a dual citizen. I have a good job and earn
decent money. I’m well educated and got promoted to a 3-5 year of
experience position after 1.5 year of working. So I was very proud of
myself. I felt like that was a pitfall and I am now being punish for my
hubris. Fast forward to the end of 2.5 hours of interrogation with the
scammers impersonating police from my birth country, with uniforms and
badges, playing good cop bad cop, they managed to get me to send my
joint saving with my partner over the last year ($10k) to an account
with a state owned bank in my birth country, because they needed to
freeze my assets during the investigation. Over the next few days, there
was a lot of manipulation and psychological harassments from these
scammers ie keeping me on the phone over meal time, yelling, pointing
out sounds in the background, making warnings about my safety and my
brother and partner’s safety, etc. A couple of days like that, and I
eventually mustered up the courage to call my lawyer just to be told
that I was being scammed and should go to the police.Now, I’ve reported
this to the Australian police, banks, etc. The scammers didn’t stop.
They bombarded my phone with messages and calls from all messaging apps.
I had to change my number as a result. My partner and I made decent
money but we had student debt, credit card debt and living expenses is a
nightmare in the city. It took us years pinching pennies to save up that
much. I couldn’t tell my parents how much money I lost because when I
tried, when I had the word “scam” out of my mouth, my mom told me I was
silly and gullible.I could not shake off the shame. I was not aware a
scam could be this elaborate.I’m depressed and on the verge of crying
all the time. During the first day when this happened, I wished it was a
scam so that the whole thing would stop. Now it stopped and I can’t stop
beating myself up. I just want to move on so that I can focus on making
that money back.
PTSD for Medical and First Responders
