Gathersburg, Maryland.A 23-year-old Brooklyn man is accused of masterminding a plan that used gold bars and fictitious reports of federal investigations to defraud a couple in Montgomery County out of over $400,000.
After reportedly impersonating a Federal Trade Commission representative and persuading a 75-year-old Bethesda couple to move their assets into gold bars in the name of protecting them from illegal usage, Yongxian Huang was taken into custody. When the victims got a text message purporting to be from Apple in September, alerting them to an unauthorized charge on their account and telling them to get in touch with Apple support, the intricate fraud got underway.
Before being linked to Huang, who allegedly represented the Federal Trade Commission, police said the couple called the number supplied and chatted with people acting as Apple personnel. According to reports, Huang told the victims that their money might be used for things like child pornography or buying Russian missiles, so he told them to turn their valuables into gold bars and send more money.
Before discovering they had been duped, the couple sent $41,000 in cash and bought more than $367,000 worth of gold bars. Following their complaint of the crime, the Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD) worked with the FBI’s Baltimore Field Office to set up a sting operation and maintain contact with the scammers.
A Montgomery County detective pretended to be one of the victims on November 14 and sent Huang a package filled with more than $84,000 worth of gold bars. Huang was then monitored while he went back to New York. With the help of the New York Police Department, he was taken into custody by authorities in Brooklyn.
The FBI and the MCPD-Financial Crimes Section are investigating the case and caution locals of being duped by government impersonators.
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